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Crown DC300A Lab. Power Amplifier

DC to 100K +/-0.5dB

JA!

I had to send off the review piece I really liked and hooked up the beast (without fuses)

Rock ass solid.

Smooth too!
Legato headroom on long bottom notes.

Fast, no pain.

Balls good, not punchy balls (IOC lights come on quick) but legato balls out the ass.

IOC (Initial overload clip @ 0.1THD vs IMD)

Them old dog hunts solid my Friend.

Highly regarded (again after 30 years since first owned one)

Wanted to fianlly follow up.

I replaced this, (below) with the old dog. (Theta Digital Intrepid 5-channel power amplifier)

  • crown_dc300_laboratory.png
  • theta_digital_intrepid_5-channel_power_amplifier.png

Comments

KurtFoster Wed, 01/22/2003 - 18:55

Bill!!! I told 'ja CROWN :D Some of it is pretty cool. All in all it's one of the best days I've had in a long time. I remembered things I had forgotten about years ago. Peoples names, songs we used to sing. What a gas. I'm loading them into Cubase so I can doctor them up a bit and I gonna spit them out on CDR's for long time archiving. I think I'll make some back up DATs and perhaps take the best of it and spit out data cdrs too. Just to have it all in 2 or 3 different places. Some of the tapes got water damaged, the whole trunk was in a flood. I thought we would have to clean and bake them but they all have played flawlessly except for one dropout. It's a blast I tell ya' ...Fats
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tannoy, Dynaudio, Blue Sky, JBL, Earthworks, Westlake, NS 10's :D , Genelec, Hafler, KRK, and PMC
Those are good. …………………….. Pick one.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

cjenrick Thu, 01/23/2003 - 18:50

DC 300. I remember a demo at Sunnyvale Electronics in 1970. The guy said you can short the output and it just don't care. Something about a huge dampening factor also. Must be direct coupled. Duhh, just figured out what the DC stands for! They powered the house system at Winterland for years. Can't remember them ever breaking during a show.

Just remembered a funny story. I was jamming with a guy at UC Davis in one of the music rooms. We had taken a 3 letter substance popular with Leary at the time, he was playing a 3 panel Moog, and I was on the guitar. All of a sudden my amp quit. I was playing through a Macintosh power amp into some AR speakers. We gazed in bewilderment at a red circle o glow in the center of the AR, followed by the cone erupting into flames. My friend put the flaming speaker cabinet on his shoulder and proceeded down the 2nd story hallway, much to the amusement of the kid's who were just getting out of class. We got it outside and put out the flames. The door had locked behind us, so we had to get the teacher to let us back in to get our stuff. Needless to say, we didn't much like explaining the speaker to the teacher or the UC Davis fire department in our present condition. The fire department filed their conclusion that said the fire had been started by a cigarette laying on the grill cloth! In other words, they got it all backwards (how do you get a ciggy to stick to a vertical speaker?). We were not allowed in that room for the rest of the semester.

KurtFoster Thu, 01/23/2003 - 21:14

Macintosh power amps and Phase Linear were both famous for this. When I was a kid we called Phase Linears “Flame Linears” .... Fats
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tannoy, Dynaudio, Blue Sky, JBL, Earthworks, Westlake, NS 10's :D , Genelec, Hafler, KRK, and PMC
Those are good. …………………….. Pick one.
------------------------------------------------------------------------

cjenrick Sat, 01/25/2003 - 13:47

Fats, You probably have a whole garage full of equipment. Do you really need more? Let me know when your gonna have a garage sale.

Doublehelix, did you ever do the drunken float from Sunrise to Goethe Park? Were you the guy shooting water ballons at rafters with the giant slingshot?

Didn't Crown make a DC150 also?
(have to say something on the topic)

KurtFoster Sat, 01/25/2003 - 15:59

cjenrick said,

Fats, You probably have a whole garage full of equipment. Do you really need more? Let me know when your gonna have a garage sale?"
Didn't Crown make a DC150 also?
(have to say something on the topic)

Yes, I have waaaaay to much stuff. But we need this Fostex 80 machine to archive some tapes into the workstation. It's not for me but for my buddy Frank who gave me my first job playing lead guitar when I was 18 (before the ice age! :D ) I have all kinds of stuff I would love to get rid of but most of it isn't high end stuff but rather old weird stuff. I have a huge road rack case on castors that used to house MC Hammers stage amps. It's 54 space or something like that. I used it to hold the power supplies for the MCI 600 console I had at the studio. A lot of odd stuff like that.

Yes, they made a DC 150, 75 watts a side. They also made a D 60 which I have one of and a D 75 which was a newer version of the D60. All great amps. Built like a rock! Fats

Davedog Tue, 02/04/2003 - 08:05

Man, i was going thru all these old threads and BOOM heres one that i got a hundred old memories about...years an years ago when i had PA gear i had a big rollaround rack full of crowns..dc300a a really old dc300(plastic label on front)a bunch of 150's and d75's...they would on occasion use up the life of a transformer and i'd have to get em repaired...it became so hard and expensive as more modern means of amplification became available that i eventually sold all of em and replaced em with first addition david haffler's...dh-220's dh-500's etc...the haflers were nice and easily repaired, though they never really broke...they also never really kicked ass the way the crowns did...just as loud...more watts at the same impedance, just...something not there...a friend of mine who ran a sound company in the midwest used to have this saying about crowns(which he LOVED btw)...he said.'yeah the one thing that crowns do that no other amp in the world does is,voltage in equals voltage out...you could plug em into the wall if you have a desire to listen to 60hz at 10,000 watts peak RIGHT NOW!!!'....ahh i miss my crowns and i've got two in the basement now that need some fixin...a d150 and my little line one i used to use for a couple of ref. monitors....i need to win the lottery...like bill was sayin ..for a pure reference amp..an old dc300a is unbeatable..and if you put enough of em in one room you dont have to ever heat that area!!i used to play bass and had a large concert rig...there was an acoustic 360 and two front loaded 15 cabs that i ran with a dc300a @2ohms.mono bridged..two fans so it wouldnt thermal..rated at 155/side @8ohms...you do the math...it was very very loud with serious tone...peace(i ramble)

Davedog Tue, 02/04/2003 - 08:21

Fats i laugh!!flame linears indeed ...we must be the same age...i was doin a show with a friend of mine who swore by those buggers...man they DID sound so good..but you took your life and the lives of all your speakers in your hands running them industrially...he even had fuses at the drivers...anyway we're into the third bands set and a loud crack out of the lows on one side and a flame comes shootin out of one of the drivers ..about 15 feet over the crowd on that side..and of course that bank is DONE...cooked ...fried etc.the people are clappin and yellin thinking its PART OF THE SHOW...course we're a little lite on bass the rest of the way...fortunately he was very modular and it only took out the one cab...still, when we broke it open the next day the phlame linear had gone dc and it had first taken the fuse,the fuse cartridge holder, and it had arced across to take out the drivers...melted the voice coils on these big ev's in the cab...quite a mess...i think he finally wound up using bgw's on the subs and lows after that...the phase's were just too unpredictable...but GAWD did they have some tone......

KurtFoster Tue, 02/04/2003 - 09:15

Aww Davedog... You and I are about an hour away from each other. I should come up and see a show some day. Are the "Spitboys" performing anywhere or is it a recording group only? Also, I am curious what you are using to record on? I love "Goin' Down To Nashville" as if you couldn't tell by my review of you post on "Streaming". Man I would love to work with you guys(I think, he he ) It wouldn't surprise me if we knew some of the same people. I have been hanging around these here parts for a long time except for a "short" 20 year hiatus in CA (to make a living). I finally got fed up with it down there and beat feet back "home". I'm looking forward to the CD. Fats
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tannoy, Dynaudio, Blue Sky, JBL, Earthworks, Westlake, NS 10's :D , Genelec, Hafler, KRK, and PMC
Those are good. …………………….. Pick one.
------------------------------------------------------------------------