Actually amps can lose power over time depending on how the amp was treated. Transistors, resistors and capacitors can tend to degrade, mind you high quality amps are made usually with high quality capacitors and take a longer time to degrade, but they do degrade this unfortunately you wont know until you have tested the amp with a multimeter. Just to further prove my point if you take a computer motherboard, capacitors can leak after years of exposure to heat, dont forget guys a capacitor is like a battery. There are also opamps, or as many people know them since these are the most common type of opamp, the MOSFET, if the amp was pushed or forced to put out more power than it was meant to this could cause a degradation of the opamp. This is why i dont like buying electronics used, unless you really trust the person.
Trust me once youve taken a couple of electrical engineering courses (we mostly covered DC) and learn how easy it is for an electrical component to get damaged I only buy electronics if i have a warranty or I really really trust that the person selling it to me took care of it.
Damn ken wish i saw your post before i bought it. Apparently the amp is only a year and a half old so its still pretty new and i think my old one is doing rated power but im not positive its about 3 years old iirc. I need to get clamped to be sure but i have no way of doing that until i go to a comp in the summer.
Im assuming just setting the gain with a dmm and getting the voltage i want isint going to correctly tell me if its doing rated or not?
BTW i dont think that these amps are strappable but they do have rca outputs so i was going to run rca's from the HU into one of the amps then run a shorter cable from the outputs of the one amp into the inputs of the other and adjust the gains to output the same voltage using a 50hz test tone. Does this seem like a legit thing to do or an i stupid for not buying strappable amps?
If the amp you bought is a year old you dont have to worry much about loss in power.
Are there any settings for the pre-outs on the amp, maybe the manual will specify the type of rca outputs. I would check online or the manual before you waste your time, the answer might be in the book.
there is no settings for the pre-outs on the amp and i do not have a manual.
I figured that simply using a dmm to check output voltage wouldnt tell me much if anything.
To my understanding strapped amps will both adjust output based on the one gain nob of the master. There is no master or slave switch on these amps so the best i can do is try to match to output voltage of each amp independently.