How the Warhorse works. A must read!

[CJ18]

This was posted in a thread of mine on another site. This is the best explanation I have ever read about how the Warhorse works.

As for the warhorse, here is a good explanation.

There is no output stage in a true Class D amp. All amps on the market today that call themselves Class D are NOT class D except for the Kicker Warhorse. Every one of the amps use a single, dual power supply section, or 4 power supplies to produce high voltage AC which is rectified and sent to an output stage or group of output stages which uses a digital carrier wave with sound applied, this digital carrier wave is them filtered off using a series of high voltage caps and inductor coils, much like you use in a low pass passive crossover to cross out everything but the bass.

In the Kicker Warhorse there is NO output stage, there are two 200 volt power supplies that have signal applied across the power supplies and controlled with a DSP circuit, each power supply is responsible for one half of the sound, one producing 200 volts of positive power with music applied across it and the other providing 200 volts of negative signal. The amp has to have a dual voice coil speaker, because instead of using a normal AC signal where the two halves are combined inside the amp, the amp sends out a positive 200 volts DC and a negative 200 volts DC to the speaker. So each voice coil sees only half of the music but the net effect is sending 400 volts of power thru the speaker. Using nothing but a power supply with no conversion losses in a rectifier circuit or output transistors makes the Warhorse the most efficient amp ever made, it has a TRUE efficiency in the 98-99 percent range at any power output at any frequency. It also can provide continuous usable power to the speaker for musical listening, where as the other few amps that are anywhere near its power rating are not made for music, just burping, like the Rockford amp(which uses a bunch of high voltage storage caps to provide enough energy to just burp the speaker, it cannot be used for normal musical listening. The Warhorse is rated at 10,000 watts and will do every bit of it, it actually makes over 12,500 watts when tested. It has to have over 800 amps of current available though to make this power, it needs I believe they recommend 10 batteries with it.

Most of the really big Class D amps are overrated and cannot make the power they say, they are usually only about 60 percent of what they are rated to do. The Warhorse has the most voltage of any of these amps, most the others are running 140 to 180 volts of power (see the voltage rating on the output filter circuit, the cap voltage rating cannot be exceeded and every one I have ever seen is only 200 volts) The other thing is that amplifier efficiency is rated at 1/3 power output, this was decided on years ago, again by the EIA, the reason being was that Class A/B amps were the most predominant amp and a Class A/B amp is its least efficient at 1/3 power output, it becomes more efficient as power output increases.

Class D (or what they call Class D) amps are highly efficient at 1/3 power output, but they lose efficiency as power is increased, so near full power they lose their main benefit of being more efficient. Class D amps also have less control, damping factor and headroom, making them have nowhere near the same sound quality as a Class A/B amp. The industry is in the 4th generation or so of Class D design, most amps sold are still earlier designs and none have achieved the reliability of a quality Class A/B amp as of yet. If it is just banging a woofer, they do that , but don’t expect it to be with much finesse or quality, and don’t expect if to last very long. But the price is low for the amount of power given.

[STEvil]

The voice coil bit interests me the most, havent read too much on the subject. The way they phrase it kind of makes it seem like you need to hook up the voice coils indipendently of each other.. but that doesnt make much sense.

[CJ18]

You read that correctly. The coils wire separately.

[CJ18]

This picture isnt very clear but you can see the 2 speaker outputs. the one on the left is for coil 1 and the right is coil 2.

[Sanitarium]

ok each coil works at 50% duty cycle, only responsible for one direction of movement? am i reading that right?

[CJ18]

ok each coil works at 50% duty cycle, only responsible for one direction of movement? am i reading that right?

It is a push pull system. The Left coil puts out +200v DC and the Right coil puts out -200v DC.

[Sanitarium]

ok each coil works at 50% duty cycle, only responsible for one direction of movement? am i reading that right?

It is a push pull system. The Left coil puts out +200v DC and the Right coil puts out -200v DC.

exactly as i said then.

no thanks i'll take an amp that does 10k and splits it evenly among the coils to work together in both directions not swap rolls.

[Rogers]

some people just cant handle change..lol

the warhorse sounds like a cool invention but not all of us are rich... just saying

[STEvil]

some people just cant handle change..lol

the warhorse sounds like a cool invention but not all of us are rich... just saying

Its an interesting setup, would work best with coils designed for it. Depending on how your coil is wrapped this is going to lead to one coil doing more work than another, but then again to me most coils are wrapped wrong anyways

[Benji0687]

I like the part of the article that slams the T15k (doesnt name it, just states it is a "high power RF amp" and that its only good for burps and not music. Gee...guess someone should tell Steve those amps dont play music? Hah!

Its an interesting read for sure, just seems VERY biased. Id like to read an unbiased review of the amp and its technology.