TonyD'Amore

New website finally launched!! DD-1 support information can be found there, as well as a Spanish owner's manual and some other downloads. Check out the fresh t-shirts that just came in and let me know if you find any bugs on the site that need to be fixed! I do know that it will not work with internet explorer 8.x --- too old Thanks all! www.DAmoreEngineering.com

Let me state , I was not at Rockford during the development of the BR amplifiers; thus I do not claim to know exactly how they work. I have a good idea though. The SIGNAL LED on the DD-1 is not filtered. Thus the reason it flickers at 40Hz, our eyes are just fast enough to detect the LED turning on and off as it follows the sine wave. This being said, if the SIGNAL LED is not coming on, the DD-1 isn't seeing anything over 1Vrms coming out of the amplifier. It is possible that the output of this amplifier is on a different ground than the B+ input ground. Let's try connecting the red probe to the + speaker terminal, and the black alligator clip to the - speaker terminal. Maybe this is what is going on.

Make sure if you do this that the "Sound Check" is NOT selected in iTunes. If this is selected iTunes will adjust the levels of the tracks. ie -10dB track will not be -10dB any more.

Guys: there will be another delay of 2 or 3 days.....one of the parts we needs got caught up in customs but it will be here on Monday night. We are building 50 as i type and its a slight process..we are doing it all in house. Made in USA! I am currently in Southern Cali with Tony, Juan and Jay Crazy working on the units. I have a better video then the one im about to show you on my other camera, but since i have no means to get it on the computer here much less edit it, i just made a quick iphone video to show we have TONS of stuff! just waiting on one little thing. 50 will go out monday morning and the remaining 200 i have, will go out probably wednesday or thursday tops. I apologize again but there is 127 total parts on this unit and if one is missing, it slows us down. Dont worry though, we will SOON be 100% caught up and have lots in stock. The sales have been overwhelming so we will do our best to keep them in the store for future purposes. If you ordered from Ray from Audio Innovations Fresno, dont worry, we are overnighting his order as soon as they are ready to go out!

Latest revision of manual can be found here for now http://damoreengineering.com/Products.html

Most amplifiers on the market today would just light up the Distortion Detected LED constantly if I had set the threshold at 0.1%

"The amount of accuracy depends on the scope." Actually it depends on the scope AND the USER

LOL

this is a neat new tool but its has NOT made the oscope obsolete by any means. i did an experiment a little while back you can try. tune your mids with a 1000hz tone until its just under clipping. now, at the same volume, play a 100-200hz tone. try it and see if you dont get clipping. i had a video of this but for some reason it got corrupted on photobucket but i could make one again. now if this thing had 40hz, 100hz, 500hz, and 5000hz. then it would replace my need for an oscope. and that would be nice, because my scope is large and needs to be plugged in. maybe the next version can have those? If you have your bass, treb, eqs, ect turned to zero like the instructions for the DD-1 indicate, then you don't need to test all of these frequencies. We did 40Hz and 1kHz so that we could do full range amplifier and subwoofer only amplifiers. in my test it was all flat. used a tone generator. i mentioned those frequencies so you can tune a 4way system. just my suggestion for what would make me interested in the product. i understand i am an odd market though and it may not be beneficial to appeal to that. maybe theres something i dont understand with what i did. thats always possible. i can make that video again and show it to you and you can tell me if i understand it correctly or not. i would just PM it to you. if you dont mind I see what you are saying, but just like Steve said; turn your crossovers off, set gain, put crossovers back. Crossovers don't add gain (unless someone really f'd up lol).

...did you read? At all? That was the entire point of the post. Dirty signal doesn't necessarily have to be clipping. Distortion lives in other ways. I read fine but you missed my point. The spike on the sine wave is not distortion imo but from something else like noise. I have seen this before. That distortion in the waveform is caused by a Class A/B amplifier with the output device bias adjustment (internal) set too low. This is called "Crossover Distortion". NO not Crossover as in Low Pass ect! Crossover as in where the waveform crosses the 0V point and goes from positive voltage to negative voltage. The DD-1 looks for harmonic distortion, that is anything that is a harmonic of the fundamental. What that means is if you are playing 40Hz (the fundamental), the tool looks for things that are not 40Hz, which any noise, "spikes" whatever are not going to be 40Hz because if they were they would be the same as the fundamental and you wouldn't see them at all. Harmonic Distortions of 40Hz would be 80Hz, 120Hz, 160Hz, 200Hz...ect

this is a neat new tool but its has NOT made the oscope obsolete by any means. i did an experiment a little while back you can try. tune your mids with a 1000hz tone until its just under clipping. now, at the same volume, play a 100-200hz tone. try it and see if you dont get clipping. i had a video of this but for some reason it got corrupted on photobucket but i could make one again. now if this thing had 40hz, 100hz, 500hz, and 5000hz. then it would replace my need for an oscope. and that would be nice, because my scope is large and needs to be plugged in. maybe the next version can have those? If you have your bass, treb, eqs, ect turned to zero like the instructions for the DD-1 indicate, then you don't need to test all of these frequencies. We did 40Hz and 1kHz so that we could do full range amplifier and subwoofer only amplifiers.

reasons: box flex environment of car transfer that jacket laying on the back seat the blow up doll in the front seat bottle of mountain dew in the port cracked window window not rolled all the way up there are actually alot of things hows that? I can understand that if you were playing a sine wave through the speakers and reading with a mic, but how does any of that stuff interfere if the signal is being read at the amp, through the terminals, with the speaker unhooked? anyway, i see the distortion light on, i see the wave that is not very clean and clearly has something going on. Whatever it is the DD-1 Picked it up! That distortion in the waveform is caused by a Class A/B amplifier with the output device bias adjustment (internal) set too low. This is called "Crossover Distortion". NO not Crossover as in Low Pass ect! Crossover as in where the waveform crosses the 0V point and goes from positive voltage to negative voltage. The DD-1 looks for harmonic distortion, that is anything that is a harmonic of the fundamental. What that means is if you are playing 40Hz (the fundamental), the tool looks for things that are not 40Hz, which any noise, "spikes" whatever are not going to be 40Hz because if they were they would be the same as the fundamental and you wouldn't see them at all. Harmonic Distortions of 40Hz would be 80Hz, 120Hz, 160Hz, 200Hz...ect

It could be that RayOVac battery... I've since switched it to an Energizer and no problems. For sure!

This is an excellent point! Also something that I will include in the revised production owner's manual. If the customer's primary source is an iPhone, iPod, ect, the tracks from the CD should be ripped to the iPod at the highest bit rate possible, and then use that as the source for all testing. Also, very important, iTunes "Sound Check" HAS TO BE TURNED OFF during this process. If not the iTunes software will adjust the level of the tracks and mess you up.

X2 Its a good question but no one wants to touch it? On the battery life: I've designed special circuitry that turns the unit "off" when it's off, meaning its not "sleeping" its actually very much off. So if not being used the battery would last as long as if it wasn't plugged into anything. When being used it depends; if it is just "on" but no signals are being examined it should last around 15 hours continuous. When signals are being injected into it, the run time would be less because the DD-1 is doing more work. If used in a shop for 10-15 minutes at a time, several times a day, it should last for months. We didn't design in a rechargeable system in order to keep costs down, and put the money into the design in more important places. If used in a very busy shop there is nothing stopping anyone from putting a rechargeable 9V in it, like this one My link Note however that rechargeable types have less capacity than a standard non-rechargeable alkaline battery, so it might have to be re-charged often.

Thanks man, my boy Juan Rodriguez and I have some time invested in it for sure.

Good stuff right there!! Nice review

I know it's hard to grasp the concept of distortion if there is no clipping. I will try to get some good pictures from my bench, showing the SMD DD-1 in action. For now, check out this picture of a distorted sine wave vs. a clean sine wave. Your little hand-held scope is not going to tell you about this, it may show it on the screen but unless you have robot eyes you aren't going to know what you are looking at. Hell, you have to look closely at those little LCD displays even to see clipping! By the way, the blue is the distorted signal, red is clean.

Me too. Ray usually says it like it is too...no bs! I really wouldnt expect much less from Tony D'Amore though Thanks man

Hey man, no not me. Tony Janke designed the 3sixty.1 and 3sixty.2 The 3sixty.3 is something totally different and neither Tony Janke or I had anything to do with it. My claim to fame at Rockford was the T15kW as well as various other amplifiers. ah shit my bad... too many tonys haha no worries man

Hey man, no not me. Tony Janke designed the 3sixty.1 and 3sixty.2 The 3sixty.3 is something totally different and neither Tony Janke or I had anything to do with it. My claim to fame at Rockford was the T15kW as well as various other amplifiers.

Voltage limit is 125 VACrms, 176VACpeak. This equates to a 15,000 watt RMS amplifier at 1 ohm, or 7,500 watts at 2 ohm ect. This, I believe will cover everything on the mobile and home audio market. I recommend setting the gains without the speakers being connected, just to save your speakers from having to deal with a continuous sine wave at full power. My testing has shown that with the speakers disconnected you end up with about 1 - 3 more dB of overlap. The exception to this would be if the amplifier has a regulated power supply, then it wouldn't matter either way. I just did two cars with it last night. Set the fronts at 10dB overlap and rears at 5dB overlap without the speakers connected. They both came out perfect. Neither car has subs yet, but when they do I'd set the sub with 15dB overlap. Tony D'Amore D'Amore Engineering When you say overlap what do you mean exactly? like you used -10DB tones for the fronts and -15 tones for the rear? Yes sir

Voltage limit is 125 VACrms, 176VACpeak. This equates to a 15,000 watt RMS amplifier at 1 ohm, or 7,500 watts at 2 ohm ect. This, I believe will cover everything on the mobile and home audio market. I recommend setting the gains without the speakers being connected, just to save your speakers from having to deal with a continuous sine wave at full power. My testing has shown that with the speakers disconnected you end up with about 1 - 3 more dB of overlap. The exception to this would be if the amplifier has a regulated power supply, then it wouldn't matter either way. I just did two cars with it last night. Set the fronts at 10dB overlap and rears at 5dB overlap without the speakers connected. They both came out perfect. Neither car has subs yet, but when they do I'd set the sub with 15dB overlap. Tony D'Amore D'Amore Engineering

It's supposed to be D'Amore Engine2ring. As in e squared. It's hard to see the little "2". I need to make it larger.