does anyone know anything about these XTR PRO amps. Could this be the first generation of Orion Class D amps? Are the just knock offs of other DEI stuff? Im assuming that this is DEI but really I have no clue? These must have had some purpose when they came out such as better efficiency over A/B in the Orion line up at the time. Honestly I have found very little other than the limited Orion specs and manual, I would rather hear from someone who used these if there any good or Im just wasting my time and should leave this in my closet. With the size of this thing and power its spec’d to produce , I would imagine its gonna pull hard on the current. Does anyone have any idea what kind of current this end table would pull. I actually think its pretty cool looking inside and out and hope it can impress me. Its not golden age O/S Orion thats for sure but I already have a few nice third generation XTRs and HCCAs in the closet museum or should I say shrine, or maybe I should call it The Temple of Lamneth! Come on guys there must me some closet RASH fans, Geddy , Alex & Keith Moon.

 

Unless there's some sort of obvious problem with it, there's no reason to not install it and use it. Open it up, check out the board and see if there are any popped or leaky capacitors, burnt circuit traces, or components that have obviously come unsoldered. If not, you're good to go. Amplifiers aren't like engines. They don't slowly wear down and degrade over time. They are almost binary in nature. Typically, they either work as well as they did when they were new, or they don't work at all. There are obvious exceptions, but those are fairly rare.

If you're that concerned you can pick up a power supply and bench test it before you install it. Or even a car battery by itself will work for function testing.

 

Has anyone got any experience running these old ORION XTR PRO 1000 at 1-ohm?

They are early class-D tech and have huge amount of heatsink surface area so Im thinking they are well capable of handling heat the load generates.

If the amp states it can handle 1-ohm Im guessing thats correct BUT the old ORION slogan was “ IF ITS FRYIN ITS ORION” and I don’t want to fry this OS goodness.

So feedback from knowledgeable users of the XTR PRO amps would be great.

The ORION XTR PRO 2400 WAS STABLE TO 2 OHM
The ORION XTR PRO 1000 WAS STABLE TO 1 OHM

Taken from the ORION manual for this range of amps.

I haven’t really found anyone with much knowledge on these late era ORION amps.

anything would be helpful.

 

I was under the impression that the older XTR Pro amps were class a/b instead of class D.
That changed with the next models though. At least that's what I remembered.

 

These are mono block amps.

250w @ 4 Ohm
500w @ 2 Ohm
1000w @ 1 Ohm

Typical wattage breakdown with low impedance that you would see in a high current Class-AB or Class-D

What leads me to believe its CLASS-D is the fact that the Frequency range is bracketed at 20HZ to 250HZ only.

I just found an online link to a photocopied version of the original manual and it states :

“Since the ORION XTR PRO 1000 & 2400 is a limited bandwidth Class-D, the lowpass crossover is always active as the amplifier will not produce frequencies over 250Hz."

So these are indeed early Class-D tech. This amp was manufactured in 2001 and was either the last of the ORION owned builds or the first gen of the DEI.

I know very little about the early manifestations of Class-D tech but would like to know more just from a history perspective.

The heatsink is massive on this amp especially for 1000 watts. Its 20” long and it weighs a lot. The boards look great in my opinion and the workmanship is very nice with great clean solder joints, tiddy and good quality parts.

Did the early CLASS -D amps perform well or was there teething issues?

I could imagine the limited bandwidth is one clear indication of how far the tech could go at the time. But there must have been some performance gains to this design at the time. The obvious advantages are power consumption.

Orion had plenty of proven tech in there class AB at the time such as the XTR lines and the HCCA lines.

Apparently the XTR PRO amps were to bridge the gap between 4 ohms High voltage XTR LINE and the .5 ohm HCCA High current line.

If Orion didn’t see some advantage with Class D then I doubt they would have brough this to market.

It appears that the XTR PRO amp line was the only CLASS-D amps they sold at the time but I could be wrong. They only had 2 CLASS-D amps to offer, a monster sized 1000 Watt and a beastly 2400W. The XTR PRO 1000 did its power at 1 ohm, The XTR PRO 2400 did its peak power at 2 ohms.

I really am interested in finding out more about these amps and the whole CLASS-D emergence. Was 2000 the time when CLASS-D started to take over and how were they received compared to the CLASS AB benchmarks at the time?

The whole DEI take over was a symptom of the industry in general but I really know very little at all about it.

 

I stand corrected.
Being early class D designs I suspect their efficiency wasn't anywhere near what we have come to expect in modern versions. The size of the heatsink also makes me think the extra cooling was necessary.
Also, the narrow bandwidth tells me they hadn't perfected the power supply at that point. Probably a lot of distortion above the bracketed frequencies.
Honestly, I've never seen an old school Orion amp that wasn't a good piece of gear. The DEI buyout gets a lot of blame for the demise of Orion (and by coincidence eventually PPI) but, the Korean stuff was as good as the earlier Made In USA gear in my opinion.

The newer stuff made post-DEI is still questionable to me. I see huge power numbers being put up but, I also see efficiency taking a beating to achieve it. One of their current class D amps is less than 50% efficient at 1 ohm!

 

If you are referring to the XTR that was on the dyno judging by its efficiency and dynamic power increase it's definitely lacking in the power supply department.

 

Hook it up and impart the wisdom of your observations.

 

I just watched the BIGDWIZ dunk run of a new ORION XTR 2500.1.

3200 watts @ 1 ohm/ 13.6 volts.... with a whopping 418 amps of current draw!!!!!

This cant be normal amperage for this kind of wattage can it? Its insane.

even at 2500 watts it pulled 389 amps of current.

This has to be worse efficiency than even old school class-ab...