After running my car battery flat at a festival camp site powering a small sound system using my car amp I thought it was time to look for something a bit more efficient. The car amp is a response 4 x 100RMS it has quite a bit of grunt but it produces mainly heat, the casing gets hot enough to fry eggs on. It’s probably only around 30% efficient at best. This is fine whilst driving as the battery is being replenished from the alternator, not much good if your stopped and don’t have the engine running though.
Looking around at whats on offer in the car audio market in the way of class D amps only came up with expensive mainly monoblock sub amps. There are a few full range multi channel car amps coming on the market here but they are top dollar.
Enter the Sure Electronics 4x100w D class amp module. Found on Ebay and for not much money, when combined with one of their power supplies ($120 for both including postage) it is possible to make up a fairly powerful bang-for-buck class D amp.
The case came from Jaycar electronics catalog number HB-5556 and cost around $50 which is a bit expensive but it is a very nicely designed and robust case. A pleasure to insert a electronics project into.
After seeing the module on Ebay and doing some google searching I discovered that on diyaudio.com there is an entire forum thread devoted to the amp and a lot of audio nerds experimenting with it.
Well now it is complete. The project was a lot of fun. Here are some pictures.
