'Ole Audiophile to Paul: What a topic! Having been around several decades before protect mode became reality, boy do I remember learning the hard way with outright devastation to our precious gear. When folks bring up how perfect their vintage gear is, I think of this very thing & chuckle to myself. Speaker impedience leaning toward lower values has caused me & my friends many nightmares until it all started to be explained. No internet in those days meant learning through experience, not always fun but always expensive. Thanx.
It’s 100% impedance drops like Paul said. I’ve seen this firsthand with speakers that drop to below 4 ohms ( near 2 ohms ) on an amp that was made for 8ohm/6ohm load. Only took a few seconds of heavy bass and it would go in to protection and it would run heater than normal when it was pushing it’s limited.
Not familiar with/current Focal offerings but I demoed Grande Utopia’s some 20 years ago and they had dip in upper bass to 90db sensitivity yet S-Series are 87db and have dip to 2 ohm.
"Made for x ohm load".. No, not really.. All normal amps can i.e drive 4ohm even though it says different on the back. Thing is that most affordable amps are also kinda weak (not all) and they don't have enough power in the power supply chain. And that becomes a bigger problem if the speaker also has impedance dips that go too low. Then there is just not enough juice to handle it. Remember the amp is getting told do deliver twice as much watts in 4ohm as in 8ohm and so on... That's why I always chcek what it can actually draw from the wall before I even consider if the watts are real. I.e A/B is about 50-60% efficient. Class D is about 90+. So not really heard to do the math and find out if it can actually deliver what it says.
@@salvadorrodenas3071 I often get the comment that it couldn't be my speakers at fault because my other amp doesn't do it. I then have to explain that protection circuits of different amps have different sensitivity to various issues. Sometimes they believe me and we get down to the problem and we fix it. Other times they don't and they just have to keep living with it. I have reached the point in my path where either outcome is ok with me.
Or it has a bias issue. In older amplifiers a lot of components drift out of their values. One can tell if it is overheating at idle/no signal . |Even some 1990's kit I get in for work suffer with this.
The amp is probably internally oscillating at some ultrasonic frequency. (A problem when using "low capacitance" speaker cable..) Try running the amp with a "dummy load" (8 ohm resistors and zip cord) at the same level and see what happens. If it STILL gets hot and shuts down you've isolated the problem to the amp itself.
Dried out caps, uncorrected idle current, and probably high current transistors failure. The Denon has more driver stages and some high-current transistors for higher-current work from another driver stage inside the amp. I believe there could be a problem as well. To my knowledge, Denon is quite stable all to 2 ohms, so I might really wonder if that is the issue? Or do Focal dip to 1 ohm loads?
I had the same problem with a PS Audio S 300 power amplifier, and it went into protection mode whenever the volume knob of the preamplifier went past the 1 o' clock position. The problem persisted no matter what pair of speakers I used. I tried 3 different sets of speakers, and the amp would go into protection mode although the music wasn't even very loud. None of my other amps had this issue.
I have a similar problem with my Yamaha AS-2200 amp driving a pair of Whafedale Lintons. I let the amp warm up for about 20 minutes and Than start playing on low volume, however crank it up too 11 o'clock or more then 9 times out of 10 it will go into safety mode.
The Dynamic power on your Yamaha is why to high for the Wharfedale Linton at 11 o'clock or more they can't handle the low frequency sound is my theory Dynamic power: Yamaha AS-2200 8Ω........................................................ 105 W + 105 W 6Ω........................................................ 135 W + 135 W 4Ω........................................................ 190 W + 190 W 2Ω........................................................ 220 W + 220 W Linton: 3,5 ohms at 200W Absolut Max my recommendation would be a Marantz PM8006 or new speaker. Cheers
FWIW... Most amplifiers protect themselves against excess heat, excess current, DC offsets on the speaker leads and over-voltage. Impedance dips can trigger the excess current trap.
The Focal "only" dips to 3,1 ohm, according to the specsheet. A € 4.000 Denon should be able to handle that, I would think. Output power 8 Ohm (20 Hz - 20 kHz, T.H.D. 0.07%) 80 W. Output power 4 Ohm (1 kHz, T.H.D. 0.7%) 160 W.
I would be interested in actual measured impedance of that speaker, but unfortunately that requires fairly specialized instruments for a full frequency sweep. Hard to imagine a dip to 3.1 ohms is sufficient to cause a thermal or current overload trigger but if that dip is across a broad frequency, it’s possible. A cheap test might be to borrow a friend’s speakers that are a known easy load and see if issue recurs. My guess is Denon engineers may have wired in a very conservative current limiter that doesn’t play well with those speakers
3.I olms at low frequency with a wide bandwidth being driven at high gain with some bass heavy music..I can see the amplifier shutting down. I don't know the sensitivity of the speakers but if he's pushing 105 Decibels in a good sized space he's also pretty much tapped out the current capacity of that amplifier. Take a look at the THD differences from 8 to 4 olms that's an order of magnitude increase at 4 olms something is changing there probably the amplifier running out of current.
This happened to me once and it was because when I inserted the speaker wires into the terminals behind the amp, I had some sticking out the other side and the the positive and negative wires were touching each other.
I would check the static resistance of your speakers. You are pumping a lot of current into them .... probable clipping and sorting or fussing the voice coil. This will show up as an abnormally low impedance. The amplifier is a voltage control system so if the impedance is low in just one of your speakers it will override the current capacity and reserves. The amp is probably doing its job properly and shutting down. A blown speaker is always going to manifest in an open circuit and just stop working. If it running at say 2 olms there will still be sound coming out of it. But now the amplifier is operating in conditions it wasn't designed for. If you have a large space and need to listen at very high levels you might want to consider high quality professional type speakers they can both handle high power and have high sensitivity. Depending upon the type of music you listen to it might be a better option than overpowering high end speakers save those for critical listening at slightly lower levels . Remember a three decibel increase requires twice the power and 10 decibels is about ten times the power. Three decibels isn't very much you will here the difference but that will be just noticeably audible.
Thank you Paul for the response to my query! This is something that I had not thought of.. A follow up would be to check if other amps like the Luxman 509 or the accuphase e5000 would be able to match the min impedance of these speakers at higher volumes? If not, which amp would you suggest to deliver clean sound with good punchy bass at high volumes?
Wish my sub amp protection mode actually worked. I have nuked two so far. Not even clipping just running em hard. And my subs impedance never dips. Only rises. Dang it.
I can never understand why some so called high end speakers end up with dreadful dips in their impedance ... this is entirely due to poor crossover design ... this is what you get when you strive for a dead flat frequency response .. our ears put up with dips in response +-2dB say but massive dips in impedance not only upsets the amplifier somewhat but also causes unnecessary phase shifts too.
Indeed. It is crappy crossovers that cause these problems. A crossover network is a blunt instrument, intended only to steer frequencies to the appropriate drivers. Of late I've been seeing more and more cases where designers try to treat the crossover as some kind of equalizer... resulting in ludicrous dips in impedance and wildly inefficient speakers.
Im willing to bet one of his drivers is blown. High resistance short at higher volumes… driver is blown but still moving as a passive radiator. Take a slow-mo video whilst playing a test tone to see if all drivers are in phase.
The guy is listening to his system at "11" or to translate...Beyond MAX volume! He is overdriving his amp into horrible-sounding, unlistenable territory and damaging his speakers in the process.
@@rohurulz Are you the person who wrote the question for Paul? If so, thanks for the clarification. If you don't mind me asking, how long are your speaker cables and how are they terminated?
@@rohurulz Those are good cables. I've looked at the other responses and comments and there are a lot of good theories. You say in one of your responses that you like to listen loud, between 110-120 db. What are the dimensions of your listening room?
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'Ole Audiophile to Paul: What a topic! Having been around several decades before protect mode became reality, boy do I remember learning the hard way with outright devastation to our precious gear. When folks bring up how perfect their vintage gear is, I think of this very thing & chuckle to myself. Speaker impedience leaning toward lower values has caused me & my friends many nightmares until it all started to be explained. No internet in those days meant learning through experience, not always fun but always expensive. Thanx.
It’s 100% impedance drops like Paul said. I’ve seen this firsthand with speakers that drop to below 4 ohms ( near 2 ohms ) on an amp that was made for 8ohm/6ohm load. Only took a few seconds of heavy bass and it would go in to protection and it would run heater than normal when it was pushing it’s limited.
Not familiar with/current Focal offerings but I demoed Grande Utopia’s some 20 years ago and they had dip in upper bass to 90db sensitivity yet S-Series are 87db and have dip to 2 ohm.
"Made for x ohm load".. No, not really.. All normal amps can i.e drive 4ohm even though it says different on the back. Thing is that most affordable amps are also kinda weak (not all) and they don't have enough power in the power supply chain.
And that becomes a bigger problem if the speaker also has impedance dips that go too low. Then there is just not enough juice to handle it.
Remember the amp is getting told do deliver twice as much watts in 4ohm as in 8ohm and so on... That's why I always chcek what it can actually draw from the wall before I even consider if the watts are real. I.e A/B is about 50-60% efficient.
Class D is about 90+. So not really heard to do the math and find out if it can actually deliver what it says.
Paul is likely correct here.
I'd say there is a wiring issue somewhere as that's a pretty robust amp unless you think $5,000 doesn't get you much nowadays in an integrated.
A focal loudspeaker is a stiff load, and at high peaks, it could trigger a protective, no pun intended, amp into protection. 😀
@@salvadorrodenas3071 8 ohm nominal, 3.1-ohm dips. Pshh. My amps live in 2 ohms and 4 ohms respectively and they never get slightly warm.
@@salvadorrodenas3071 I often get the comment that it couldn't be my speakers at fault because my other amp doesn't do it. I then have to explain that protection circuits of different amps have different sensitivity to various issues. Sometimes they believe me and we get down to the problem and we fix it. Other times they don't and they just have to keep living with it. I have reached the point in my path where either outcome is ok with me.
Or it has a bias issue. In older amplifiers a lot of components drift out of their values. One can tell if it is overheating at idle/no signal . |Even some 1990's kit I get in for work suffer with this.
...but it can be hard to find a qualified and honest service technician if you can't do it yourself.
The amp is probably internally oscillating at some ultrasonic frequency.
(A problem when using "low capacitance" speaker cable..)
Try running the amp with a "dummy load" (8 ohm resistors and zip cord) at the same level and see what happens.
If it STILL gets hot and shuts down you've isolated the problem to the amp itself.
Dried out caps, uncorrected idle current, and probably high current transistors failure. The Denon has more driver stages and some high-current transistors for higher-current work from another driver stage inside the amp. I believe there could be a problem as well.
To my knowledge, Denon is quite stable all to 2 ohms, so I might really wonder if that is the issue? Or do Focal dip to 1 ohm loads?
I think more likely a fault within the amp.
I had the same problem with a PS Audio S 300 power amplifier, and it went into protection mode whenever the volume knob of the preamplifier went past the 1 o' clock position. The problem persisted no matter what pair of speakers I used. I tried 3 different sets of speakers, and the amp would go into protection mode although the music wasn't even very loud. None of my other amps had this issue.
It has two serious transformers!
Maybe there is a problem with the protection circuit it self
I have a similar problem with my Yamaha AS-2200 amp driving a pair
of Whafedale Lintons. I let the amp warm up for about 20 minutes and
Than start playing on low volume, however crank it up too 11 o'clock or more
then 9 times out of 10 it will go into safety mode.
The Dynamic power on your Yamaha is why to high for the Wharfedale Linton at 11 o'clock or more they can't handle the low frequency sound is my theory
Dynamic power: Yamaha AS-2200
8Ω........................................................ 105 W + 105 W
6Ω........................................................ 135 W + 135 W
4Ω........................................................ 190 W + 190 W
2Ω........................................................ 220 W + 220 W
Linton: 3,5 ohms at 200W Absolut Max my recommendation would be a Marantz PM8006 or new speaker. Cheers
FWIW... Most amplifiers protect themselves against excess heat, excess current, DC offsets on the speaker leads and over-voltage.
Impedance dips can trigger the excess current trap.
The Focal "only" dips to 3,1 ohm, according to the specsheet.
A € 4.000 Denon should be able to handle that, I would think.
Output power 8 Ohm (20 Hz - 20 kHz, T.H.D. 0.07%) 80 W.
Output power 4 Ohm (1 kHz, T.H.D. 0.7%) 160 W.
I would be interested in actual measured impedance of that speaker, but unfortunately that requires fairly specialized instruments for a full frequency sweep. Hard to imagine a dip to 3.1 ohms is sufficient to cause a thermal or current overload trigger but if that dip is across a broad frequency, it’s possible.
A cheap test might be to borrow a friend’s speakers that are a known easy load and see if issue recurs. My guess is Denon engineers may have wired in a very conservative current limiter that doesn’t play well with those speakers
@@MichaelM-to4sg a simple ohm meter in metween will work tobemassuee the impedance drops
3.I olms at low frequency with a wide bandwidth being driven at high gain with some bass heavy music..I can see the amplifier shutting down. I don't know the sensitivity of the speakers but if he's pushing 105 Decibels in a good sized space he's also pretty much tapped out the current capacity of that amplifier. Take a look at the THD differences from 8 to 4 olms that's an order of magnitude increase at 4 olms something is changing there probably the amplifier running out of current.
This happened to me once and it was because when I inserted the speaker wires into the terminals behind the amp, I had some sticking out the other side and the the positive and negative wires were touching each other.
I would check the static resistance of your speakers. You are pumping a lot of current into them .... probable clipping and sorting or fussing the voice coil. This will show up as an abnormally low impedance. The amplifier is a voltage control system so if the impedance is low in just one of your speakers it will override the current capacity and reserves. The amp is probably doing its job properly and shutting down. A blown speaker is always going to manifest in an open circuit and just stop working. If it running at say 2 olms there will still be sound coming out of it. But now the amplifier is operating in conditions it wasn't designed for. If you have a large space and need to listen at very high levels you might want to consider high quality professional type speakers they can both handle high power and have high sensitivity. Depending upon the type of music you listen to it might be a better option than overpowering high end speakers save those for critical listening at slightly lower levels . Remember a three decibel increase requires twice the power and 10 decibels is about ten times the power. Three decibels isn't very much you will here the difference but that will be just noticeably audible.
Thank you Paul for the response to my query! This is something that I had not thought of.. A follow up would be to check if other amps like the Luxman 509 or the accuphase e5000 would be able to match the min impedance of these speakers at higher volumes? If not, which amp would you suggest to deliver clean sound with good punchy bass at high volumes?
P.S. I really love playing at high volumes in excess of 110 to 120 db
That Denon should be a beefy amp, something doesn’t sound rite. Unless your really trying to fill a big room loud, it should get those Focals singing
Some 8 Ω speakers aren't 8 Ω speakers.
Could it be clipping due to India's wonderful power grid?
I have the same problem when playing a lot of bass.
Wish my sub amp protection mode actually worked. I have nuked two so far. Not even clipping just running em hard. And my subs impedance never dips. Only rises. Dang it.
I can never understand why some so called high end speakers end up with dreadful dips in their impedance ... this is entirely due to poor crossover design ... this is what you get when you strive for a dead flat frequency response .. our ears put up with dips in response +-2dB say but massive dips in impedance not only upsets the amplifier somewhat but also causes unnecessary phase shifts too.
Indeed. It is crappy crossovers that cause these problems.
A crossover network is a blunt instrument, intended only to steer frequencies to the appropriate drivers. Of late I've been seeing more and more cases where designers try to treat the crossover as some kind of equalizer... resulting in ludicrous dips in impedance and wildly inefficient speakers.
Im willing to bet one of his drivers is blown. High resistance short at higher volumes… driver is blown but still moving as a passive radiator. Take a slow-mo video whilst playing a test tone to see if all drivers are in phase.
Power source too low?
Amps are not supposed to go to 11
It is 11'o clock on the volume knob (ie less than half) and not at 11..
@@rohurulz it's one more than 10
Is the Amp connected to Mains Power directly or via a Mains protector ?
Via a mains protector
Weak amps say goodnight when the volume is turned up🤷♂️
ATCs are flatter than an Asian woman. As per ATC they don’t go lower than 5.5.
Most amps only go to 10.. This one, this one goes to 11 which is more!
Eleven o'clock 😂
😎@@salvadorrodenas3071
The guy is listening to his system at "11" or to translate...Beyond MAX volume! He is overdriving his amp into horrible-sounding, unlistenable territory and damaging his speakers in the process.
it is 11 'clock (ie less than half) and not at 11..
@@rohurulz Are you the person who wrote the question for Paul? If so, thanks for the clarification. If you don't mind me asking, how long are your speaker cables and how are they terminated?
@@tototronic2 yes I am. They are connected by bananas and are a out 10ft long transparent super cables
@@rohurulz Those are good cables. I've looked at the other responses and comments and there are a lot of good theories. You say in one of your responses that you like to listen loud, between 110-120 db. What are the dimensions of your listening room?
@@rohurulz Do you use the tone controls on your Denon?