Don't knock it. Honestly all the stuff comes from China anyways and whose to say that just because a boutique seller slaps their name on an amp and charges triple what it's worth that's what makes a good amplifier. Looking at the guts of various brands of amps I know for a fact that previously good amps with good components have cheaped a bunch.



A recent example is Focal. The FP used to be very good metal knobbed pots, good solid RCA only inputs, and looking at maxdat.eu for the FP 4.75 internal componentry looks pretty nice. But if you take a look at the newer FPP line you'll see features that look an awful lot like they cheaped out. The metal pots are gone replaced with cheap China obvious plastic pointer pots, it has the ubiquitous generic plastic speaker level inputs, remote volume control, and cheap specs to boot. It can't even output double its rated power when impedance is halved from 4 ohm to 2 ohm. Putting those specs out there without referencing the brand most people would swear you're describing a cheap China amp, but this is Focal.



That's a $400 amplifier for specs that a $100 amps like a Crunch or Boss can easily outperform. 4x90 watts at 4 ohm and 4x140 watts at 2 ohm. I mean if you look a budget brand like Hifonics is CEA rated and they easily double their power output when impedance is halved. What exactly does this mean? It means somewhere inside that Focal the power supply can't provide enough power, that to me means they cheaped out on the components necessary to build a good power supply section. It's a clue the rest of the amplifier wasn't built with all that much care to quality either.



Really I've never had trouble with my budget amps over the years as long as I never abused them. They worked fine and budget amps I've installed in friends cars are still bumping to this day 12 years later.



But take a look at the reports here of amps failing. It seems there's just as much of a chance of a high dollar amp failing as a budget one. It tells me that both the quality of the budget amps is pretty decent, and definitely the quality of the famous names has declined. The only thing a quality name brand is useful for is a warranty and even then if you blow your amp up from abuse you're SOL.



I've tested my Boss amp and nothing could really be said that was bad. It doesn't overheat has a built in fan and at 800 watts RMS there's no visible distortion in the waveform on my o-scope. It may not get .000005% THD at rated power but it's definitely less than 1% since there was not visible distortion, which is usually around the .5-1% THD range which still isn't audible in bass frequencies.



So really if you can't tell the difference in output between a high dollar amp and a budget. There's really not much differentiating them. And again I've yet to have any of my amps fail under normal use including all the cheap amps I've installed in friend's cars.



One thing I've learned over the years, don't be brand whore. I've seen people over and over put ALL Rockford gear in their car and I ask why? They're not even sponsored, in which case if you're sponsored I'd understand but there's no point in really sticking to a brand just because. I buy for the quality I want, not for the price point.