Lepai 168HA 2.1 Amplifier

[njk70]

Not sure if this was the best forum for this or maybe SSF. Seems like maybe there should be a separate forum for conversations about building cabs and one for showing off specific builds.

Not sure if I will have a question here, but am going to share my experiences so far with the Lepai 168HA 2.1 Amp.  I wanted to build a SSF system for my cabinet (still building) and I chose 3 Lepai 168HA 2.1 Amps. I chose them as they seemed a common choice on the various forums and is the amp used in at least some real pinball cabinets by Spooky that got good reviews for sound. However I also read many reviews that panned the amp badly, but not being an audiophile (and this not being a home stereo system) I made a guess I wouldn’t notice the difference.

For me the amp appears to functioning as well as I had hoped. Many people said the crossover for the subwoofer didn’t work but I can certainly hear it doing something as I change it. Whether it is accurate on its cutoff I don’t have the test equipment or ears to really tell you but it seems to do the trick. I will post a followup after I fine tune all the channels.

That said….. THE SPRING TERMINALS ON THE BACK ARE GOD AWFUL!!!.   They are incredibly flimsy and break loose if you apply any kind of force to them. You have to use fairly thin speaker wire.  Not being an audio person I erred on the side of large, actually it was probably unintentional as I was going through Amazon and wound up with 12awg speaker wire which were HUGELY too big and this broke loose my first terminal. I went back and ordered 16awg wire which seemed reasonable but even that was the absolute limit of the terminals and was a struggle getting them in and almost all the terminals are a bit wobbly. You would have to use 18awg or thinner for better results and I don’t feel like rewiring the speakers yet again. As I struggled with them I figured I’d replace the amps with better ones as I was expecting them to not work well based on reviews I read after buying them. Since I am liking them I am thinking I will have to open them up and solder on some kind of alternative connection (my soldering skill suck, so that may be ambitious). But as they stand if I don’t tug on the wires too much they are staying in place barely ok.

I had some thoughts as to why this amp gets bad reviews.  Lepai is the “made in china” house brand for parts-express.  It is inexpensive and fairly popular. As such there are several even cheaper Chinese copies like Lepy, Lepei, Lvpin which have even poorer build quality (I hear).  I have seen teardowns of the Lepai amp (so branded on outside) that show a printed circuited board stamped Lepy so it appears when you buy off Amazon you can wind up with counterfeit units (buy direct from parts-express, they are inexpensive and have good customer service). Also Lepai has changed the amp fairly regularly over the years without changing the model name so there have been different case designs and possibly some year’s models have had issues (wild guess). Lastly the power supply provided is fairly minimal and anyone testing the limits of the amp will see it get cut short of rated output because the input power is insufficient. The provided power supply is 12V 3A, it can take up to 14.5V 5A and more commonly people use 12V 5A. For our application though I think 12V 3A is more than enough, I can already hear the damn thing in the street.

Ok. I did have a question. Rather than have 3 power bricks in my cabinet powering these could I wire them in to my (yet to be purchased) 12V power supply (provided it was big enough)? Any problem (noise?) with audio amps being on same power supply providing power to devices like solenoids and motors?

 

 

 

 

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[njk70]

I am well past my knowledge point on amps. The crossover controls on this amp appear to have little effect. It seems to attenuate frequencies fairly slowly so whether it starts attenuating at 50hz or 200Hz doesn’t seem to make much difference. Its not sending full range to the subwoofer channel, its just the adjustment control doesn’t change the response curve that much. I think its ok. On some heavy bass tests I was concerned about the exciters getting too much bass, it would be nice if it was filtered off but I don’t think it is. Not sure how you would do that and these are probably just extreme cases you only see in testing and running a bleepin’ pinball will be just fine and dandy vs putting in a few hundred dollars of specialized audio equipment. Some people complained about the separate sub and main volume controls but for pinball cab that is a really useful feature.

 

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