How would one go about finding actual wattage benchpress ect. of an amp? I'm imagining an elaborate mathematic formula here, it can't be a vu meter and your ears.
all you need is a VOM (volt-ohm meter) and an amp-clamp.
put the amp-clamp around your pos speaker wire and touch the VOM's leads to the pos and neg speaker terminals. have the VOM set to volts AC and the amp-clamp set to Amps AC. Then run a sine wave (tone burst). Then just take the numbers your get and plug them into this elaborate formula:
and buy the way, depending on the frequency of the tone your use...you will get different values from both meters.
even if you have your amp wired to 1ohm nominal, the actually impedence (AC) will change across a frequency range, this is because a speakers voice-coil in inductive.
Ex: my amp is wired to 1ohm, but at 50hz my "box rise" is ~3.3ohms.
to find the actually impedence that you have at a given frequency, use this formula:
most accurate way to measure power output of an amplifier is with a regulated power supply, a dummy non-inductive load, and an oscilloscope. you'd use a test tone at a specified frequency at a 0dB reference level to generate the signal for the scope.
