Amps without cooling fan?

[Poke]

my TB500 has a loud fan.....fine when out jamming, annoying when playing in the family room for practice...I have removed the fan , cleaned and reinstalled and it seemed to make an improvement...maybe tightening things up helped

I returned the Eden E300 head because it has 2 fans!... really noisy...killer amp though, really powerful

I also have a TB500, and the fan is pretty noisy, and it runs constantly. I wondered if I just got one with a bad fan, but i think it may be normal for these amps. Love everything about it, otherwise.

Every other amp I've ever owned has been nearly silent.

 

[lowfreqgeek]

The SWR SM400S does have a fan that blows across the heat sinks. It is just not externally visible except through the top slots of the amp. Even my old Bass 350 had a fan in it. SWR amps still got really hot, my guess being the fans were not effective enough.

My Bass 350 has a fan, as did my original Basic 350. My Studio 220 did not that I recall. The fans in the 350s are plenty loud in a living-room setting. Not a big deal on a loud stage, but certainly noticeable.

 

[packhowitzer]

They may have minimal venting because they have a fan... to control the air flow to the hot spots in a logical order. Some products are not safe to operate covers off.

Dell computers seem to miss the point. I've never seen one that doesn't run cooler covers off, nor one I couldn't thermally shutdown with a Pi calculator. I do some pretty extensive and mean hardware testing before we roll out a new model, make a report and call it a fail, but the powers that be always choose another optiplex, and we still have a good 20 to 30% failure rate, despite being a 24/7/5year biz class PC that normally gets replaced every three years.

the optiplexes my company uses pretty much mirror what you've said here.

*sorry for the derail.

 

[okcrum]

I heard my Streamliner fan for the first time today. We had an outdoor gig at 102F in the shade. The band all had fans too. They were much louder than the Streamliner.

 

[Razman]

Definitely stay away from an old Lab Series head, I owned one briefly and the fan sounded like a turbine - very loud.

 

[Roxbororob]

The SWR SM400S does have a fan that blows across the heat sinks. It is just not externally visible except through the top slots of the amp. Even my old Bass 350 had a fan in it. SWR amps still got really hot, my guess being the fans were not effective enough.

The SM400 fan was just an after thought factory mod to placate those customers who were sure their amps were going up in smoke! They were fine without but they could sure get hot.

 

[agedhorse]

The SM400 fan was just an after thought factory mod to placate those customers who were sure their amps were going up in smoke! They were fine without but they could sure get hot.

There were reliability challenges with the pre Fender models, Fender engineered a new, cooler running class G/H power amp to improve things. The original models run really hot and had a higher than acceptable failure rate.

 

[agedhorse]

I hear ya, I'm surprised that a lot these lower power (200-300 watts) class D amps have fans though. Are heat sinks impractical with these for some reason or is it just the enclosure is too small? My TC BH-250 is admittedly even smaller than my 450W Walter Woods which has no fan just heatsink fins and a "beer intake port" top vent.

The enclosures have shrunk to where there is inadequate convection, especially when driving very hard.

 

[NoiseNinja]

A Prose Poem About the History of Fan use in Amps

There was a time when no amps had fans.
Many of those got pretty loud, too.
Those that had higher power either had big heat sinks
or a reputation for unreliability.

When we started looking for more power in a smaller package,
then fans became a thing.
You can't have a small size and a big heat sink.

If you really need the quiet of a no fan amp,
find an older one with no fan.
Any lack of power should be unimportant at any volume low enough to hear a fan.

Ever considered writing a whole book using this concept?

I suggest the tittle: Amplified!

I know I would definitely read it, even possibly buy it.

 

[blaine_hyatt]

Little out of date to some, but the 800rb is a solid, quiet convection cooled amp

 

[Wisebass]

The SVT has a fan.

the SVT has more than one fan

may the bass be with you

Wise(b)ass

 

[alaskaleftybass]

My GK MB200 and MB500 have fans and are dead quiet. Sometimes I play my GK's very quietly late at night at very low volume playing along with YouTube on my TV. The amp is so quiet you could hear my dog sleeping on his couch even while I play.

I had the Peavey MiniMax and was heartbroken that the fan sounded like an 18" room fan. I wanted so much to like it because Peavey powered my tours for nearly twenty years. But couldn't get past the loud fan. I had two different Edens and the fans were noticeable but not too loud. I sold them, had seller's remorse, now I'm on a quest for another Eden.

I had a Bugera Veyron MOSFET and it was very silent. For an amp that said it had 2000 watts I sure had to crank it past 50% master to get any volume out of it. Come to think of it my MB500 kicked its ass.

One last consideration: The new 200 watt Trace Elliot ELF amp, looks about the size of a paperback. Too small to have a fan. I'm hoping true to its tradition, 200 Trace watts will be very loud and the diminutive amp will be very quiet. But since it's now owned by Peavey, who knows how many months, quarters, or years we have to wait. Look at how long it took to release the MiniMax and MiniMega.

 

[alaskaleftybass]

the optiplexes my company uses pretty much mirror what you've said here.

*sorry for the derail.

Sorry to be the adversary gentlemen but I've had very good luck with Optiplexes. We use them for everything-- garage automotive diagnostics, onboard computers in vehicles for mapping sewer lines under the city, Precision workstations for designing projects in AutoCad and ArcGIS, graphics intensive dual monitor number crunching, GIS mapping, and more. I've used HP, Acer, Lenovo, and Asus. Dell builds are so well built their parts are universal and standardized. You don't even need a tool to take apart an entire computer. If you use Dell Pro Support, you wait on tech support for 3 minutes and your part arrives within 3 days. Very easily field replaceable. Ever tried to order a part from HP? Ever seen all the mismatched screws HP uses to assemble a PC? A Mix of hex head screws and phillips. You don't even need a screwdriver for a Dell. And my basement storage is filled with a bunch of 64 bit Optiplexes that we pulled from inventory just to replace with newer models. My Dells are built like Mack Trucks. I dread the thought of working on HP's Acers or Asus.

YMMV.

 

[BadExample]

Sorry to be the adversary gentlemen but I've had very good luck with Optiplexes. We use them for everything-- garage automotive diagnostics, onboard computers in vehicles for mapping sewer lines under the city, Precision workstations for designing projects in AutoCad and ArcGIS, graphics intensive dual monitor number crunching, GIS mapping, and more. I've used HP, Acer, Lenovo, and Asus. Dell builds are so well built their parts are universal and standardized. You don't even need a tool to take apart an entire computer. If you use Dell Pro Support, you wait on tech support for 3 minutes and your part arrives within 3 days. Very easily field replaceable. Ever tried to order a part from HP? Ever seen all the mismatched screws HP uses to assemble a PC? A Mix of hex head screws and phillips. You don't even need a screwdriver for a Dell. And my basement storage is filled with a bunch of 64 bit Optiplexes that we pulled from inventory just to replace with newer models. My Dells are built like Mack Trucks. I dread the thought of working on HP's Acers or Asus.

YMMV.

Everyone knows there are no computers in Alaska, or even residential electricity. It's just to dangerouse in your igloos!

 

[J-Bassomatic]

Definitely stay away from an old Lab Series head, I owned one briefly and the fan sounded like a turbine - very loud.

I hear you, did you have to plug it into an outlet on the back like mine?

 

[Razman]

I hear you, did you have to plug it into an outlet on the back like mine?

I think so - great sounding amp otherwise.

 

[alaskaleftybass]

Everyone knows there are no computers in Alaska, or even residential electricity. It's just to dangerouse in your igloos!

SOLAR POWERED IGLOOS bro @BadExample

 

[LowG]

Always record loud.

Sometimes you can't. If you're recording with acoustic instruments mixed in the same room as your amp you need to balance the volume.

 

[Korladis]

Sometimes you can't. If you're recording with acoustic instruments mixed in the same room as your amp you need to balance the volume.

So use an acoustic instrument.

Or put the rig in another room.

 

[seamonkey]

If you're recording, any constant, narrow-bandwidth noise can be an issue. Especially if it's in the frequency range of the instrument you're recording.

Agreed - it's best to not record noise you don't want on the recording.

Not everybody today has an ideal recording space. It looks like one persons solution was a fanless power amp:
Fanless...

Currently Cheap here: Behringer A500 REFERENCE AMPLIFIER Professional Studio 600-Watt + Full Warranty | eBay

If you do record noise, with some work there are lots of plugins now to filter it out. They have real use such as recovering old recordings.

What's funny is there are plugins to add noise and hum to a track. Somebody did this in a blind study of modelers and fooled a lot of people to picking the modeled amp as real, because it had more noise. Sample libs also add string/fret noise, even accidentally muted or squeaky notes at times. What a world!