BRADFORD BENN: Hi. My name is Bradford Benn. I'm director of application engineering for Crown International. We're a leading manufacturer of high-powered amplifiers for the touring, fixed install, pretty much every place you need amplifiers. What I want to do is take a couple of minutes here to talk with you about our new Macro-Tech i Series, which is our newest amplifier, and go through some of the features and benefits it gives you.

So looking at it fairly quickly, see on the front panel we actually have the power button, which is relatively obvious. We have the level control, we have our signal inputs, we have your ready light, and you have the other level control. One of the nice unique features is that as you adjust the level, you see that the LED turns down in the background so that you can see in a glance how it's set up. The other thing you can do with that exact same feature is you can have that be your output meters set up via the software, which I'll talk about in a second, to be able to make the output meters bounce for you.

Another feature that’s very nice when you're setting up a system is if I press and hold for one second, that'll start blinking and I just muted the signal whether I return the knob down or turn it back up, turn it down, so it's a fast easy way to set it up.

It's an analog amplifier with a class I output stage. It has digital control of it even though it's still analog. What this means for you as the users is that you have input compression/limiting, load monitoring in real time, output voltage limiting, and average power limiting as well as thermal limiting and load monitoring, so it gives you a lot of protection and capability without ever converting the signal to the digital domain, and that can all be done through the rear panel.

If you notice on the rear panel we have an Ethercon Ethernet jack for the 100BASE-T network connection that it runs using HiQnet System Architect which is free software and a CD is included in the box or it can be downloaded. We also have your analog inputs with a loop through. You have the NL4 connector for each channel or you can have both channel 1 and 2 on one NL4 as well as your banana or five-way binding post.

In addition, all of the modes such as bridged mono, stereo, or Y can be controlled via the back panel as well as three different input sensitivities of 1.4 volts gives you full output, 32 dB of fixed gain or 26 dB of fixed gain. What's nice about this since it is software controlled, all of these features including the front panel knobs can be locked out, making themselves easy to set up, set with the software and then lock it so that no one messes with the settings, and that's the Macro-Tech i.

The only thing we didn't talked about was the power ratings on it which range from 25 to 65 watts for 20-ms burst all the way up to 5,900 watts for 20-ms bursts. And you can also see the constant power ratings there. So that's the Macro-Tech i.