Jensen Power 5500

Nice amp, but large in size not good for small car

The amp worked great and SonicelEctronix did good business, but unfortunately the amp I bought was way too big and didn't fit in my tiny trunk.... it hooked up great though.

Awesome Amplifier for the money !

We purchased this amplifier to drive a 200 watt 10" Pioneer low profile sub, (2) Pioneer 5x8 240 watt 3-ways, & (2) Cerwin Vega 5x8 2-ways in a Ford F-150 Supercab. The power & sound is truly amazing with this system. Amp has a lot of adjustments to help you set everything for your specific vehicle & taste, and the remote bass adjustment for the sub is a huge plus for making adjustments when changing styles of music. The bass in this truck will now literally shake the windows out of their frames. Only con is the size, it is a large unit but we mounted it under the rear seat which solved that problem. You won't go wrong with this amplifier, it has performed flawlessly, and crystal clear with no distortion.

A good budget amp

Recently, I became interested in revamping my car's audio and quickly realized that the upgrade should start at the amp. I decided to replace everything (speakers, head unit, etc, buy sub). It's easy to get caught up in the quest for perfection and end up spending thousands of dollars on your audio setup. This is why I made myself a rule: stay on budget. The goal was to revamp everything for under $900 or so, and I managed it, largely thanks to this amp. Other 5-channel amps are a lot more expensive, and 4-channel amp+mono amp combos will also cost you a lot and take up a lot of space. You can easily spend something like $600 or more if you buy a 5-channel sub at Best Buy, and have them install it.

So I am finally done with my setup. What are my impressions? My very first thought when I was unpacking this amp was that the amp enclosure must have been designed by a bunch of monkeys. First, this thing is HUGE. Very few cars will have enough flat surface anywhere in the car to mount this thing. There is no way this amp will fit under passenger sit. You may try to mount it on the back of the back seat, but it didn't work in my car because I didn't want to give up the larger right half of the folding seat because I want it to fold to transport stuff. The other half of seat was too small. So far this amp just sits on the floor in my car's trunk, anchored by some wires so it doesn't fly around. When I have time I'll look into mounting it on trunk wall. Second problem is that this thing rattles. The cheap, mediocrity designed back cover bends and hits parts of amp enclosure producing some nice metallic noises. Now imagine this thing sitting next to your sub. In fact, when I took this amp out of box, the back cover bent inside and stayed bent! I had to remove the screws and the back cover, and the put everything back together. Fortunately, this problem is fixable. I bought a roll of some heat resistant thick foam from Walmart, and placed strips of it between the back cover and the rest of the amp assembly. There were no more rattling noises after that.

Besides these two stupid design issues, I have no other negative comments about this amp. The rest works as advertised. You get four 4-ohm channels providing 60 watts RMS at 1% THD for your speakers (my manual says 70 watts at 2% THD) and one 200 watt 4-ohm channel for the sub (at 2% THD). The sub channel will power a 300 watt sub at 2 ohms (2% THD). Of course, other combinations are possible, like running 2 higher power speakers and a sub. However, don't try to run two or more subs off this unit because only the fifth channel (officially designated as the sub channel) has a low pass filter and a subsonic filter on the amp. For the speaker channels you get an optional high pass filter. Every channel has its own separate volume setting. Right now, I have 60watt infinity reference speakers in the front, 40watt Pioneer TS-A6872R speakers in the rear deck, and a 300 watt sub in the trunk. The crossover point is at around 75-90Hz (it's hard to tell, the knob is not labeled properly) Everything works as advertised, so I can't complain about sound quality issues. All in all, this is a good amp for a beginner level car audio project on a budget. I just wish the company put a little more thought into the design of the amp enclosure.