In the last few months I've seen an onslaught of new products from Rockford Fosgate - woofers improved for better sound quality; the long awaited and much smaller Punch amps; and now a first look at one of their new Power series amplifiers, and yep, it's different too. And by different, I mean it's significantly different than any other Power-series amp I've ever seen.
I expected the box containing the Rockford Fosgate Power T600-2 to be the size of a small coffin. After all, it was rated at 300 watts x 2. But it featured an all-new, more compact design that made me wonder if the performance was downsized as well - it's literally about half the size of the model it replaces!
Measuring under 14" long, about 8" wide and a hair over 2" deep, I was pleasantly surprised to see that evidently someone had given some thought to the overall size of the product and realized that it needed to be much smaller to fit in average installs. Traditionally, Rockford's amps were always on the porky side when it came to dimensions, but these new amps are changing all that. The main top section of the amp is finished in a rich-looking, high-gloss black polycarbonate, using an in-mold process for the Rockford Fosgate logo. The rest of the amp is finished with a smooth, low-sheen, black powdercoat. And, in another departure from what has been expected from Rockford, when it came to fit and finish, this amp was flawless and better than any Power series amp Rockford has produced in over 10 years.
The amp uses a one-piece cast-aluminum heatsink that serves as the base and makes up three sides of the amp. Deep wells for the mounting screws are cast into each inside corner. The front side of the T600-2 uses the same type of heavy-duty connectors that we've seen on the Rockford Fosgate amps for a couple of years now, and while they allow you to insert the cables far enough to prevent any possibility of bare wires being exposed (and get them good and tight with a #2 Phillips), there's no provision for allowing the wiring to be hidden.
Circuit Design And Features
On the front panel you'll find the usual pair of RCA inputs and a pair of paralleled RCA outputs, a gain pot, a crossover pot and a Punch EQ pot, with the usual switch to select the -24dB/octave slopes of the highpass or lowpass crossovers. Three stylish angular LEDs peek out from under the edge of the top cover indicating power on (blue), thermal (red) and protection (yellow).
Nothing too unusual here, except that the new Punch EQ circuit adds not only the usual bass boost, but also treble boost to the output if used in the all-pass or highpass modes. When Jim Fosgate first developed and subsequently patented the Punch EQ circuit, it was designed to help overcome road noise in a vehicle at highway speeds. Back then, it was done with two separate knobs, and the EQ curve on the treble boost was a little different than the one found on this offspring, but the concept remains the same. This new version should be interesting to listen to because in many cases the bass boost is needed, but the treble, not so much.
Internally, the amp didn't stray much from its predecessors - mostly a good thing - yet there are some very significant departures from the Rockford norms. As expected, it's all surface-mounted parts, but it now uses some common individual circuits like power supply control, the output driver stage, signal manipulation, and the input circuitry, all located on individual daughter boards. These smaller boards are mounted vertically to the main motherboard. Some of you might recall the Rockford Punch HD series of amps with the fragile ceramic daughter boards in them, but don't confuse them with this version - these boards are heavy-duty, military-grade, double-sided, plated-through glass epoxy units and mounted so solidly that I actually picked up the amp by one.