Put yourself into Crown Audio’s product managers’ shoes: You have the renowned touring audio power amplifier line called the I-Tech, and you have the task to create a smaller mass music market version that sells for a competitive price but still has the features and power ratings this market wants. In this pursuit, I believe Crown has succeeded very well with the XTi line of amplifiers.
I took delivery of the XTi4000 because of its 1200 watt per channel at 4-ohms rating, which has enough flexibility to drive professional grade speakers, and could do subwoofer duty in smaller venue applications. And in this review, I am going to give you a bit of what hides behind this “I-Tech like” power amplifier.
Even though this is a class AB+B amplifier, the Crown Audio XTi4000 is very much in keeping with Crown’s power amplifiers lineage. At two rack-spaces, 18.5 pounds weight, and 12.25 inches of chassis depth; virtually no other audio power amplifier could meet these specs without a switcher power supply and a switching power amplifier. And on the back of the amplifier chassis, there is a large American Flag decal that boasts that the XTi4000 was designed and assembled in good old Elkhart, Ind. Having been inside the Crown Audio factory, and seeing the nicely de-signed guts of the XTi4000, I can say that the factory automation pretty much removes most of the hand labor in assembling the amplifier, and thus there are no cost benefits from foreign build in countries with cheap labor.
The Gear
Starting with the front panel, the Crown Audio XTi4000 has the basics covered with two detented level controls, a power on/off switch and two LED bargraphs for status and signal level detection. With the ventilation holes on the top half of the front panel for cooling air intake, what’s left are the three buttons and the adjoining Liquid Crystal Display to handle the fancy Digital Signal Processing (DSP) preamp inside the XTi4000. Be-sides obvious mono/bridged/stereo routing, the DSP allows for extra self-contained speaker processing features like crossovers, digital EQ, time delay and limiters. While these DSP features are not very flexible compared to dedicated speaker processors, they do cover the essentials just fine.
The crossover feature selections are canned 90Hz, 100Hz, 1200Hz, 1500Hz, 2000Hz plus 2-channel sub and custom settings from Harman Pro’s HiQNet System Architect software. System Architect also allows parametric EQ selections, but the EQ cannot be tweaked just by the front panel buttons. The channel time delays are per channel and in millisecond increments for 1 to 50 millisecond choices. Note that these are more for speaker to speaker alignment than for driver alignment purposes. The limited choices on the channel limiters are -3dB, -6dB, -12dB and off. While better than nothing, personally, I would have either skipped the DSP altogether or put in a full dbx DriveRack processor capability.
On the rear panel, the normal IEC power inlet is accompanied by the usual stereo binding posts and pair of NL4 Speakon Jacks. A single 3.5-inch exhaust fan attests to the simple cooling air needs of the XTi4000. For inputs, the In/Thru XLR connectors per channel are accompanied with a USB-B jack for the HiQnet interconnect to up/download the DSP.
Performance-wise, I found the Crown Audio XTi4000 right up there with similar 1200 watt per channel amplifiers with great damping factor (>500, 8-ohms @ 20Hz to 400Hz), 1.4 volt full power sensitivity, 20Hz to 20kHz frequency response (+0/-1dB), and a 34.2dB voltage gain. This XTi4000 was rated for a 120VAC +/- 10% line for power input, and draws about 8.0 amperes at the nominal 1/8th power rating in stereo 4-ohm loads. And for the digital amplifier skeptics, it has a 0 – 40 degrees Celsius external operating temperature range.
The Gigs
When racked up and out in the clubs, I put the XTi4000 through its paces as a mid-frequency mains amplifier, a subwoofer amplifier and some full-range wedge duty. As suspected, the Crown Audio XTi4000 delivered power non-stop in all applications like any other non-switcher 1200 watt per channel amplifier would do. In the subwoofer application, I heard no artifacts in driving a pair of 2 by 18-inch woofers, but the amplifier was obvi-ously giving all it had to do sub support with rock ‘n’ roll live sound.
In summary, the Crown Audio XTi4000 amplifier is designed reasonably solid, but I thought the DSP at the LCD panel could have been beefed up. To me the LCD and the associated buttons took the ruggedness factor away from what is an excellent step up from the CE4000 series, and chip off the old I-Tech series. As an electrical engineer, I thought the elegant PCB/heatsink design is worthy of praise from both a manufacturability per-spective and a trustworthy thermal design.
What It Is: An amp rated at 1200 watts/channel at 4 ohms.
Who It’s For: Regional soundcos and your heavier anklebiter gigs.
Pros: Good sounding, plenty of power, compact design
Cons: DSP could use more flexibility at the front panel.
How Much: $1591.00 MSRP
Web site: www.crownaudio.com
