Wonderful zpa thread derailment

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Sun Sep 23, 2007 9:37 pm

sounds just like a normal zpa to me....i didnt know they acted any other way when they go out...when they work they work great and blow your mind....but when it gets funky like that its time to just throw it away

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 9:41 am

1moreamp wrote: " throw it away " ??? Let me know when your throwing away collectible PG amps and I will stand in line to catch them as you toss them

collectible or treasured only applys to people that think they are good amps....i still dont hold those zpa's much over trash in my book....they are prone to fuck up too much for me, i like what pg was trying to do with them but they really missed it with that amp....i also consider "m" series amps trash also...i have chunked many of them, i guess im funny like that....to me the ms is and will always be the bread and butter for pg amps....anything else is just dumpster bait.

marko · Post by **marko** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 9:57 am

i agree with you on the ms series but the m and zpa are still a force to be reckoned with, but they seam to crop up more with holes in the boards than the ms series.

Post by **AVICJR** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 12:21 pm

theburb wrote:
1moreamp wrote: " throw it away " ??? Let me know when your throwing away collectible PG amps and I will stand in line to catch them as you toss them
collectible or treasured only applys to people that think they are good amps....i also consider "m" series amps trash also...i have chunked many of them, i guess im funny like that....to me the ms is and will always be the bread and butter for pg amps....anything else is just dumpster bait.

The MS line is great, but the M series isn't "trash".

Burb--you're from Texas correct. I had my M's mounted in my trunk with no air circulation to them here in South Texas for more than 11 years. I also live on the water--Gulf so they were exposed to heavy salt in the air. I have had no problems with them whatsoever and they still sound as good as the day I took them out of the box.

I'm not trying to call you out as I know you know your stuff and you've been around the block a few times BUT those are bold statements your making. We're all here as aficionados to what we consider the best car audio company in our minds. To this day, I see more M series amps on ebay than any other line, and nearly all of them are still functional.

Mastiff · Post by **Mastiff** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 12:51 pm

theburb wrote:
1moreamp wrote: " throw it away " ??? Let me know when your throwing away collectible PG amps and I will stand in line to catch them as you toss them
collectible or treasured only applys to people that think they are good amps....i still dont hold those zpa's much over trash in my book....they are prone to fuck up too much for me, i like what pg was trying to do with them but they really missed it with that amp....i also consider "m" series amps trash also...i have chunked many of them, i guess im funny like that....to me the ms is and will always be the bread and butter for pg amps....anything else is just dumpster bait.

WTF ? do you sniff glue offten ?

Post by **smgreen20** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 1:46 pm

Nope, just goes straight to eating it.

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 6:44 pm

AVICJR wrote:The MS line is great, but the M series isn't "trash".

Burb--you're from Texas correct. I had my M's mounted in my trunk with no air circulation to them here in South Texas for more than 11 years. I also live on the water--Gulf so they were exposed to heavy salt in the air. I have had no problems with them whatsoever and they still sound as good as the day I took them out of the box.

I'm not trying to call you out as I know you know your stuff and you've been around the block a few times BUT those are bold statements your making. We're all here as aficionados to what we consider the best car audio company in our minds. To this day, I see more M series amps on ebay than any other line, and nearly all of them are still functional.

lol, my i do love this board and these post are why i missed it so....but i can back every statement i make, im not a new boot when it comes to pg or car audio...shit i still remember stillwater mohawks...lol

i am from Austin, Texas and i was here when Custom Sounds built the the pg yellow brick road, they helped make it the brand u love and cheerish now....some of yall have been running pg since they dropped like me and others have stumbled onto the brand so to speak and now they just collect the amps that pop up here and there and talk about how cool they are..

well i was there when the ms and m lines first hit the market and how they were sold and installed and how they really held up....if u had a bmw or audi or some other nice car that needed to sound good u went with the m's....but if you wanted a diehard work horse that would hold its own against any of the power series amps then u bought an ms....see back then its was all about how many 15's-18's you could throw in your car and or funny mini truck..

so with that said the lines were clearly drawn in the sand and the ms was the most stable amp out there...you can run it all day with out even a blip and if there was a blip it was just that the fuses popped...so you just turn it over swap them out and run it some more...m's would just die, they are good amps for a nice install but they arent super amps and we all know that.

ok so back to my run down of the texas pg history lesson....when pg finally was ready to phase out the ms amps they brought out the *new and improved zpa" everything you loved and wanted from the ms275 & 2125 but without the bullet proof reliability that made them famous....but the new amps did have built in cooling fans and shiny leds and plexi to keep u happy when u yanked it out to get serviced....

ok so the first batches were basically duds after that they were hard sells....because for the price of the "new zpa's" that almost always gave you shit, you could just save some money and just grab a dead stock 2125 or a 2250 for half the price....so now let me ask all of yall this....tell me what amp you would favor if you actually were in a store at the time looking at all your options with cash in hand..

i love pg to death but that does make me a pg sheep...they have built awesome products but they have also made a some dumpster trash and with my hard earned money i want something that is worth it..

btw...if you ask me the zpa was the kiss of death for pg when it dropped they lost major dealers that had no other choice but to let them go....i think the saphire and xmax were the only things that kept them around till the storm passed...

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 6:49 pm

also if you didnt roll like this, with kicker in the front and pg in the back and you were from that era...im sorry to tell ya but you were just a novice in car audio and there for you might not understand what im trying to say now .....but i still have love for all of you

Post by **AVICJR** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:08 pm

Again, I know your no newb. My friend (Houston area) that got me into PG 14 years ago had a ride like you posted above, and yes he competed using the MS line, hell you may know the guy. I was just defending the honor of the M series amps. I didn't compete nor wanted to (my friend built my system and wanted me to in the amateur line) but my S10 had a "hell a nice" SQ on two M25's. I was 17/18 at the time and I couldn't afford MS amps plus I didn't want to compete so no need in spending that kind of money when I could accomplish the same in a single cab S10 for half the price. Both those amps plus the M50 I bought a year later are still fully functional. Hardly "trash" is the point I'm trying to make.

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:58 pm

AVICJR my post wasnt directed towards you i was just using half of your post to start a point...the other half of my post was going towards the folks that say i sniff glue and im crazy because i know the difference between the lines and what i consider trash in my books..

i feel ya on the standing up for the m-series they are good amps if you just want a nice sleek install thats how they are made and sold..

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 8:09 pm

i want to touch on another related thing that im sure will keep getting brought up in this new topic....

when i say the m's are trash and people will keep telling me "no they are still around and they work i see them all the time"....well thats because if somebody bought an m new they were most likely just a casual listener and wouldnt put much of a strain on the amp thats why they are still around....but a good chunk of them are still burnt and blown the fuck up..

but with the ms amps 8 times out of 10 were used and abused from the first day they got installed....so everyday since then has just been a journey into hell and thats how they love it...an ms amp will have so many owners in its life time that they should be tagged and tracked just to see what really happens to them....thats the amp that you should stand and admire when u see them pop up for sale after 15 years of abuse and all the countless installs not have anything other then some minor scratches and still be ready to just plug and play is something special in its own right......i have seen few dead ms amps then any other pg product....thats all im saying

Post by **AVICJR** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 8:12 pm

I just wanted to let you know that I'm not one of the one's that just fell on PG after the fact to collect something cool.

Like I said before, your post earlier was very BOLD. There are other's that read these threads with no experience with the M's or ZPA's for that matter that may take your subjective view to heart. I'm sure you have your reasons for not liking either line, which is cool, but not everyone is quick to dismiss the entire line especially since the amps are pretty much built the same other than power supplies.

If it wasn't for the M's I would be running **cough**cough** JL or Kicker or RF**cough**cough** --Not that there's anything wrong with them.

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 8:22 pm

hey my reasons are clear and true and any pg nut will understand that im just speaking the truth about the amps and their weak points...i wish the zpa wouldnt have had so many problems i think that was the best f'ing amp they would ever create, they used the green coils from the team 2250 for a reason...they just over designed it and that was the down fall...i didnt make the faults i just saw them and adapted

i see your from texas so i know what time it is...

btw...the punch dsm ix were some of the best fucking amps ever made....god the early 90's was when car audio was the shit...

Post by **AVICJR** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 8:28 pm

theburb wrote: i see your from texas so i know what time it is...

btw...the punch dsm ix were some of the best fucking amps ever made....god the early 90's was when car audio was the shit...

Ditto on the 90's, what I'd do for one more week of my life back then!!

Not sure what your other comment means?!

marko · Post by **marko** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 9:37 pm

theburb wrote:i want to touch on another related thing that im sure will keep getting brought up in this new topic....

can you remember what the original topic was about? this thread started off great but of no use to me now

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 10:22 pm

marko wrote:
theburb wrote:i want to touch on another related thing that im sure will keep getting brought up in this new topic....
can you remember what the original topic was about? this thread started off great but of no use to me now

i remember....i said it was trash in both topics

Post by **fuzzysnuggleduck** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 11:12 pm

One man's trash is another man's gold.

Instead of letting the garbage man pick them up, let me have them.

brenzbmr@sb · Post by **brenzbmr@sb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 11:50 pm

okay burb

ill agree with you since i actually sold pg from 94 to 03

ms was the amp that brought pg to the status that all of us old timers remember..

im gonna graze from this for a moment since i bought my first ms2125 and 275 (which i still have the 2125) from custom sounds, bought it from mike colfield) had it on display(this is when they only had two locations in austin) in there newer store. didnt believe the price or the statements made by the sales staff on the amp.. (the only reason i walked in that store is because they had a banner boasting pg having the most expensive amp, the mph-6300 for 50k) some sales dude took me to the back of the store to listen to a ms275 running four kicker c-15s in a
if i remember a station wagon of some sort.

i walked right back in there and bought that ms2125.
i lived in killeen for 4 years and used to always cruise to austin.

moved back to hawaii in 93 and i was running two rockford pro 15s i bought from audio dimensions when they gave up rockford.(92) bought all my alpine from them.

so basically a year later and a couple of local soundoffs i became pretty well known in my area, landed a job at a young stereo shop and
pg was one of the brands they carried..

back to what you were saying, to all of you that love the zpa, burb is telling you the truth, the amp for a lack of a better word was a bitch.

it was so well designed and over built but yet so picky, the ms amps
were built so tough and yet had less problems.

the zpa was built off the same principle yet pg went overboard on the
standards for it...
no op amps on the inputs so you needed a line driver to feed it 10 plus volts.
crossover card that used to always pop out while driving
a external cross over that used balance line drivers which meant to fully benefit the design behind the goal of this amp meant lots of extra money needed to be spent.

the fricken fans always crapping out on the first gen amps

even had some amps sent to me with boards not even lined up properly so you coulndt propelry put in the pwer wire.

so agian i agree with the fact that untill zx came out the only thing holding that company in the market was the saphire line (which we sold alot)
and the xmax sub line which for there first subwoofer release did really well.

we were still selling ms amps that were available at the time but were then replaced with zx and later zx titanium which then became titanium.

now to the burb. were you an installer at that time period?

i remember always hanging out at Audio dimesions, custom sounds
and in killeen they had a shop called dyer electronics(i think austin had a dyer but it was like in the ghetto.)

remember alot of soundoffs in killeen before i left.

shop called audio generel opened up before i left.

always remember this big white dude at dyer in killeen with a maxima i think like a 89 that had two rockford pro 18s in it.

also i agree with your state ment of car audio in the ninties and that the rockford punch amps (dsm, i , ix )were the shit since we also sold rockford.
but to me the ms amps sounded alot better, they were warmer wheres a
punch 200ix just was brute power.

hey burb let me know where you worked if you were in car audio in the ninities, we might have actually met along time ago....

aloha.

brenzbmr@sb · Post by **brenzbmr@sb** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 11:54 pm

theburb wrote:also if you didnt roll like this, with kicker in the front and pg in the back and you were from that era...im sorry to tell ya but you were just a novice in car audio and there for you might not understand what im trying to say now .....but i still have love for all of you

i rolled with rockford pro series and pg amps in the back...

car really hammered, i was shutting down guys running four 15s and way more power..

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 12:46 am

lol....what do you know about "farfugnugen" that 2 door voltswagen he had was the shit...i actually talked about this with you before many years ago but thats another story...

i lived right around the corner from the custom sounds you are talking about it is on burnet road i grew up in that store...sammy with the pony tail and mike raised me and took me from a pos car audio kid to a full blown monster....im sure we crossed paths if you spent anytime there or on the scene....like you mentioned there weren't many cool shops intown but they all were in the same basic area...audio dimesions had soundstream, dyers was selling lanzar and customs was selling nothing but the truth...the choice was easy and i havent looked back since.

god thinking about shit like that takes me back....i cant believe how popular fleck spray paint was at the time...lol

brenzbmr@sb · Post by **brenzbmr@sb** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 8:22 am

fleckstone paint was the shit

i also remember mike very well because he was honest.

burnet road, i remember now. audio dimensions also carried alpine,
jl audio, dropped rockford.

i remember hanging out at audio dimensions becuase i love rf subs.

then when i walked into custom sounds i saw the pg amp and its been
history eversince.

i got to go work mywife is yelling.
ill be back.

aloha

Post by **Wakeup** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 9:58 am

--->i got to go work mywife is yelling.
ill be back. <---

hehe....I'm in between mowing my front and back lawn...had to check the forums haha.

tipracer · Post by **tipracer** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 1:16 pm

ah yes the days of minitrucks w/12- 15's, fleckstone, plexi, and art series water cooled amps....Aahhh. They don't make em like they used to..

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:48 pm

stipud wrote:I've "heard you out"... you already stated your opinion on the ZPA amps, and I even made you your very own thread for that. I don't need you to come back and start the same derailment here again.

He's asking how to fix his amp, not how to get rid of it. If you went to a classic car forum and asked "how to rebuild my motor", and some guy came along saying "just burn it to the ground it's trash buy a new one". That adds absolutely nothing to the discussion... what kind of reaction do you expect?

$100-150 in parts is a gross exaggeration if the problem is simply a number of FETs. On this forum some of us like to restore and rebuild our amplifiers, not just throw them out because we can't be bothered to diagnose what the problem is.

I've fixed similarly glitching amplifiers for a whopping $0 before. A cold solder joint just needs a quick lick of a soldering iron, or a quick spray of contact cleaner in the right spot is all it takes sometimes. Boy would I have been disappointed if I threw out a perfectly good amplifier that I could have fixed for free!

if you show me a zpa 3 or 5 that you fixed like that and i will shut my trap....but im quite certain you cant...that goes for you and any other member on this board that is a repair guru... im pretty sure you never ran across a zpa that was an easy fix because they dont exist...i was being nice and realistic and all you do is get mad...im not talking about stories im talking about proof....tell me the total for ordering parts and shipping the amp both ways and how much it cost when it is all said and done....just show me and i will not talk about it again.

im very knowledgeable when it comes to cars and i have been in the loop for years online and offline for my state....so if anyone came to a board or just on the street and was like hey i have a blown 350 and i want to rebuild it...the first things that would come up are is it late model or a numbers matching block for a restore "ms/route/bandit,outlaw amp"....for the numbers matching block you go out of your way to save it for the fact that its crucial for the car....but if its just a late model engine like the "zpa" they would ask how bad the block is and if it was so far gone it would be more cost effective to just get a short black and stroke it over....but these amps arent motors they dont need to be compared to motors they are just boards and circuits....even when you speak of them like motors the answers are still clear as day...

theburb · Post by **theburb** » Tue Sep 25, 2007 7:59 pm

tipracer wrote:ah yes the days of minitrucks w/12- 15's, fleckstone, plexi, and art series water cooled amps....Aahhh. They don't make em like they used to..

man what about the pull out radio in your left hand and your pull off steering wheel in the other....

man those really were the days its just sad they dont build them like that anymore....the most people had in their cars that could be "felt" for blocks and blocks was about 700-1000 rated watts you had 1500 if you were a full blown monster and you liked killing small animals when you would drive by....700 now sounds like shit compared to how it really is....thats why im stuck in the past....people always question my install theories and amps that suggest.