Hi everyone! I just purchased a used Nad c325bee ,it's in good shape very clean almost new,sound is amazing But i am not familiar with this amp,and afer 1hours only of playing with the volume at the 10 o clock position, the heatsinker are throwing an enormous amount of heat....my question is ....is this normal??? I used to have a 7125 receiver that was also doing this. The amp is driving a pair of Paradigm studio 80.
Leo's idea is sound advice. When I had the Marantz SR-7300 I used a small heatsink fan connected to a 2-12v variable transformer as I had little ventilation in the cabinet. It did the job well and could not hear it from my listening position even at low volumes. Best to use it to draw the air out, not in or you will inject dust into the amp's innards.
My last PC had 2 fans blowing IN, another pair blowing out, a pair of fans on the video card and Northbridge part of the chipset, another pair in the powersupply....1 full time and the other temp controlled and yet another as CPU cooler. total=9 fans. It sounded like a Helicopter landing in my den.
Thanks for the help guys ,i wanna keep things simple so i was thinking of using one of those small clip on fans ,and use it to blow air in parralelle to the unit where the holes are on top, since the unit is empty under the heatsinkers(i can actually touch them by putting my fingers under the amp)it should create an outward draft in the unit. Noise is not an issue . What do you guys think?
if you can get your hand underneath, then I need not recommend raising the unit to provide incoming air for convection, I was gonna go there. Yes, a cross breeze will be effective, if there is somewhere for the warm air to rise away from the amp's home enclosure.
Thanks guys, the unit is already 3/4'' of the ground (i guess the good people at Nad already planned for this),but i will add little rubber pads to make it an even 1'', with the fan cross breeze i should be fine. Worse comes to worst i could use it as a pre-amp to drive the amp section of my Yamaha ax-592.
Be careful with fans. If the NAD is in a rack, open on 4 sides, the fan will help unless you interfere with the natural convection of 'heat rises'. If the NAD is enclosed on 5 of 6 sides, like it would be in a cabinet, then blowing air IN may be a bad ides. You might want to get a small thermometer and get sensitive to how hot your amp actually runs. If you blow air into such an enclosed space, you may actually interfere with natural convection, create 'dead' air which doesn't move much and thereby trap more heat at the unit.
link to image of interior of the 'BEE. place small box fan on the vents above the power transistor heat sinks, blowing UP and basically sucking air out of the amp.
The rack that holds the amp is open on all 4 sides and it's got a good 10'' of breathig room on top. Is anybody familiar with the softclipping switch? Should i leave it on all the time?