Fit_Acanthisitta_475
New member
Go and put your hand on the lid of your amp right now if it sits behind a closed cabinet door. Someone posted a short thank you on r/hometheater this week for a recommendation they had picked up in another thread, the gist being that a cooling fan cost a bit more than they wanted to spend and was still cheaper than frying the receiver. Not much of a post, but it is the right instinct and most people ignore it until something dies.
The thing worth understanding is why cabinets kill amplifiers. It is not that they get warm. It is that hot air has nowhere to go, so the air immediately around the chassis keeps climbing and the heatsinks stop doing anything useful. Those little vent holes drilled in the back of AV furniture are mostly decorative, because without airflow you are just giving the heat a very small door it has no reason to walk through. First symptom is usually a shutdown twenty minutes into a film at volume. The slower symptom is capacitors ageing at a rate nobody notices until years later.
The fix people keep landing on is a small thermostat controlled fan pulling air out at the top rear of the cabinet, and AC Infinity is the brand that comes up most in these threads. Two things I would add to that. Exhaust, do not blow cold air at the front of the chassis, or you just stir warm air around. And set it on temperature control rather than leaving it running, because a fan buzzing in a quiet room at midnight is its own problem.
Or take the cabinet door off. Free, silent, ugly, effective. Anyone actually done that and kept it that way?
The thing worth understanding is why cabinets kill amplifiers. It is not that they get warm. It is that hot air has nowhere to go, so the air immediately around the chassis keeps climbing and the heatsinks stop doing anything useful. Those little vent holes drilled in the back of AV furniture are mostly decorative, because without airflow you are just giving the heat a very small door it has no reason to walk through. First symptom is usually a shutdown twenty minutes into a film at volume. The slower symptom is capacitors ageing at a rate nobody notices until years later.
The fix people keep landing on is a small thermostat controlled fan pulling air out at the top rear of the cabinet, and AC Infinity is the brand that comes up most in these threads. Two things I would add to that. Exhaust, do not blow cold air at the front of the chassis, or you just stir warm air around. And set it on temperature control rather than leaving it running, because a fan buzzing in a quiet room at midnight is its own problem.
Or take the cabinet door off. Free, silent, ugly, effective. Anyone actually done that and kept it that way?
