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Is this weird? (NOT a Behringer bash . . . )

I have a couple Behringer K3000FX amps I use to play bass through. I like them, but they never seemed very loud (like the 75 watt Peavey TKO-80 I have), but since I use a stereo pedalboard, I plugged left/right into channel one and fed a hot signal, and it worked fine.

Recently read that someone took one to their amp tech to test the power amp and, after bench-testing it, the tech told him that each channel put out only 75 watts, and you'd have to send the signal to all 4 channels to get the amp to put out 300 watts. Weird, huh?

This sounded beyond goofy to me, but I just had to test it for myself. I pulled one of my input cables from channel one and plugged it into channel two and turned it up. Holy cow -- as I pulled the plug in and out of channel two, I could hear a significant increase in volume! Much more than the left/right stereo configuration into one channel I'd been using.

So . . . is what this guy's tech told him legit? Can amps be designed to operate on a wattage-per-channel basis? It certainly sounds like it to me. But there's just one base power amp and one mixer/pre-amp in the box.

What do you think?
 
Hi.

I think I'm confused ;).

It's clearly a mono KBD combo. With a 4 channel stereo "mixer". There shouldn't be any difference what so ever whether all the channels on the mixer are in use or not.

There is however a possibility of an intentional pre-/power amp level mismatch, so every channel feeds the input 1/4 of the "headroom" the power amp input has.

75-150W RMS before clipping to the specified load from a 300W (advertized watts) cheapo sounds about correct though.

Regards
Sam
 
Hi.

I think I'm confused ;).

It's clearly a mono KBD combo. With a 4 channel stereo "mixer". There shouldn't be any difference what so ever whether all the channels on the mixer are in use or not.

The combo itself is mono (one speaker) but it has a "stereo link" where you can gang together two combos and have the left/right signals go to different combos. It works.

There is however a possibility of an intentional pre-/power amp level mismatch, so every channel feeds the input 1/4 of the "headroom" the power amp input has.

That's what I was wondering, whether such a thing was even possible. It is a very transparent amp. No wonder, with no chance of pushing it to distortion. ;)