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Check out the new review on the Mike Mono block amp. Thanks Justin Rock On!

it's got a lot in common with the Easter Bunny , Santa and getting 50 virgins for being an idiot.........

All audio rules of thumb are a myth.

I'm just giving credit where I feel credit is due. BTW I would give just about anything to be a play a bigger role in that kind of stuff. I love every SSA product I've tried and do everything I can to get the SSA name out there. Not only do the products kick ass but the way you guys run things and take care of customers is top shelf in my book as well.

Cosmetics I love the look of this amplifier, the gun metal color scheme is very nice and appealing to the eye versus the standard black you see from other companies. I didn't have any problems with the stated wire sizes fitting into the power, ground, remote and speaker terminals. The dials aren't hard to turn at all , this product comes with the usual standard crossover network that most subwoofer mono amplifiers have. The bottom plate has vents for extra air flow, as you see in my build I placed to rubber feet under its mounting tabs to allow the amplifier to breath. At the end of the day you have a simple, sleek amplifier that will win you over everytime you open your trunk and take a glimpse of it. Performance I have no qualms on why this amplifier would not put out rated power, I haven't tested it myself or seen anyone test this amp but it is pushing my SSA Icon 15" very well. The only upgrades I have electrical wise are three ground wires under the hood, all in 1/0 car audio wire and 2/0 welding cable. One run of 4 gauge Knukonceptz OFC run of power from battery to rear of car with a 4 gauge Knukonceptz OFC wire to a sanded area for the ground. Amplifier hasn't gotten warm but I don't really take long trips, still trying to get everything dialed in and waiting till I get an AGM battery for under the hood. Hopefully I can find a local meet or car audio show to do some more testing and get it metered. Missed a show this past weekend but know some guys on a team down here, so I should be able to in the loop more. Overall Opinion In conclusion, there are no cons I can think of when it comes to owning this US Acoustics Mike amplifier. I need to stop playing around and order the Barbara Ann for my front stage setup. At the price and power ratio you cant find a better buy, this amp is well built without the bells and whistles. Thanks for the comeback US Acoustics, hope you guys stay around and introduce more products to the car audio world. Thanks to SSA for giving me the opportunity to own this amplifier and once again sorry for the long delay on the review. Don't really know what else to say fellas, about to go take a ride and enjoy some tunes. Not much for words and wish the review could be longer, any questions ask away. If you want to check out the build log then check out page 5, where all the new updates begin:

this one gets no carpet or paint...........

a Baltic birch single kerfed flared enclosure for a FI Q 12" ..... 2.25cf3 tuned at 30hz

that's a dark oak stain I like working with birch but I'm not cutting another sheet until I have 60 tooth blades on my saws the shit splinters a bit with 32 teeth unless you cut REALLY SLOW.........................

I totally agree. I loved all the SSA subs I've had : Icon, Xcon, and now Zcon, all in 15". To the OP : the Dcon is a good choice on that power.

Sorry Aaron for the overdue review on the US Acoustics Mike amplifier as it's been sitting for a year and a half in my closet. Thanks to SSA and Aaron for this great product wonderful customer service as usual, I didn't have any problems with my order and the shipping was fast. Product was packaged as it should be double-boxed without any signs of damage. Now onto pictures of this little guy, it has more weight to it then you would expect. Pictures first then review will follow.

Thank you for the review. Nice work. Always nice to see another POV on an amplifier.

Oh yeah, there's probably going to be a fourth build where I would run a DCON or GCON coming up.

Got everything playing finally. Zip tied everything in place before the console went back in place. I removed the duct in the console for the rear air so that it vents air into the console. Refrigerated amplifiers! Temporary bass setup so I can take my time with the box and stretch the legs of the fresh recone a little bit.

Nice review.

They put deadening on the parts that are dead and not on the parts that are sources of structure borne noise? Wtfbbq??

ok lets start here.... i just took off door panels. i could not figure out the negative terminal on my battery. there were 2 nuts or bolts, or whatever, things holding the negative portion in place. and neither one seemed to work with disconnecting. so i still took off door panels. but did not disconnect anything electrical on them. just took them off a few inches. and i took a few pics of what i could. it seems like they put the 1 ft by 1 ft, dynamat sound deadener over the birch wood speaker spacer... which should help protect the speaker spacer from moisture i hope. but i could not tell if they used a gasket tape for the speakers. which i wanted to look for. but the deadener is covering that area. not sure if it was happening before i just took off panels. but the rear speakers in my car are NOT working at all now. i tried using the fader on headunit and changing other settings, and putting headunit to default, and still no rear speaker volume.... but i changed the tweeter attenuation on the passive crossover to -4b. it seemed to help a slight bit. not much. the lowest setting is -6 db. i will probably change it to that later. but the door panels came off very easy. just extremely difficult to line up properly to place them back on. any reason why the rear speakers worked before. but now they dont? they worked after the shop installed the amp , headunit, and front speakers. and the front speakers are hooked up to the amp. the rear speakers should just be hooked up to the headunit. and the rear speakers are factory. wondering if the rear speakers could have blown from something? or maybe when i opened the door panels in the front, it somehow messed with wiring for the rear speakerS? i highly doubt the front panels affected them though.... and heres the images of what i could take. sorry for horrible angle...

Wow, we need to bring you for product reviews. Thank you for the killer feedback. It meas a lot.

Try moving the balance to just one side, if you all of a sudden get better bass response then you either have one whole set wired out of phase or just the woofer. Out of phase means that not all the speakers are wired + to + and- to -. There are certain cases where out of phase is a good thing, it might even help your case, but that's what testing and tuning is for.

My biased vote would be for an SSA Dcon 12 S4 sealed. The size of the cone has nothing to do with how clean the music it produces. It is all about the install/enclosure.

She's pretty too.

No, no, that's awesome, just so rare anymore. I see so many people talking about running stuff not just at 1 ohm but at .5 and lower that seeing someone who wants to actually run higher just caught me off guard. LOL That's going to be fantastic! I know I love my XCON, I'm certain you'll love yours as well!!

Florida_Audio : stop thinking about numbers ! I know, I know, I do it too !!! Take your time to read the more you can on this forum. read that too: The12Volt

RMS is a real world measurement, or can be and that's why you look at it. The peak ratings that many manufacturers use is strictly a marketing gimmick to lure in new buyers who aren't educated to the fact that the peak wattage number can be any made up number they want it to be. I like to refer to the peak amplifier wattage ratings as ILS ratings, If Lighting Strikes, lol. The RMS ratings you were referring to are measured ratings BUT they don't use music or speakers to make those measurements. They use a single frequency or tone and measure using a high power capacity resistor. It's the only way to get consistent, repeatable measurements. They have to use a single frequency to keep the output constant and consistent. They also have to use a resistor because a speaker is what's called a "reactive" load. Due to the physics involved in the inductance of the voice coil and several other physical factors the impedance, resistance or in other words the load the amplifier sees changes with frequency. So let's say at 1khz our imaginary speaker has an impedance right at 4 ohms, but say at 100hz the impedance is 10 ohms. Because of that the measured power applied to it would change just because the frequency did. A resistor is a dummy load, no matter what frequency is applied the resistance never changes. Therefore it's possible to get a consistent and repeatable measurement. Once you go and hook it up to a speaker and play music through it everything changes. The only analogy I can come up with to explain the dynamics in music is driving on a country road. The majority of the surface is somewhat smooth and the suspension doesn't have to travel much but mixed in with that is bumps, holes and things that make your suspension travel much more. It's varying constantly and therefore is dynamic in its response. Music works much like that where the smoother parts are the quieter instruments and parts of the song (think woodwind instruments, backup singers, a rhythm guitar). The rougher parts are lead guitars, the lighter rhythm of the drums, the lead singer and the roughest parts are the hard drum beats and bass guitar riffs and those parts of the song. All together it's a cacophony of sounds in a rhythm one finds pleasant to listen to. As far as the many more things it's a bit complicated to explain some of the aspects. The simple ones like location, aiming, mounting and deadening are easy enough and if you can get them right makes a lot of the other aspects less of an overall issue. Location doesn't mean just right where they put them from the factory. In fact the factory location and aiming are often about as bad as one can get for both. The best location depends on the speaker being used and what it's being used for. Typically the closer you can get the aiming to "on axis" or aimed at you, the listener, the better it is. Mounting refers to how the speaker is attached to the vehicle. The most common factory mounting methods are plastic rings or baffles or right to the sheet metal of the vehicle itself. Neither are great options as a speaker can produce a considerable amount of mechanical energy, especially when turned up loud. It should really be mounted to something solid, unmoving and acoustically dead. Which brings us to deadening. Deadening stops panel resonances (unwanted vibrations), mechanical noises (an interior panel slapping against the body for example), and blocks outside noises from coming through and into the cabin of the vehicle. As you can imagine this all can be quite an undertaking to accomplish inside of a vehicle. Which is why I keep saying "as close as possible".

15 feet isn't long, hell in the audio world 30 feet isn't long. At least not for that application. Power (watts) is a product of both CURRENT and voltage. First, look at it like this, say for the sake of easy math we're talking about 100 watts even. It would take 10 volts AND 10 amps of current to have 100 watts in our imaginary circuit. Now I wouldn't want to try to flow 10 amps of current through a 20 gauge wire, it would get ugly. However the power supply in an amplifier turns your cars 12v system into an AC signal, runs it through a step up transformer, and then turns it back into DC for the amplifier section. Now, let's say that in our imaginary circuit that the voltage is 50volts, not 10, that would mean the current would only be 2 amps to supply 100 watts of power. The 20 gauge wire may still be a little light but for the distance of run inside a vehicle it's manageable. Now we get into the other part of the way it works in audio. Just because an amplifier is rated as being capable of 100 watts of output does not mean that 100 watts is coming out of its outputs all the time. In fact, the only time the output gets anywhere near the full 100 watts is when the input signal is causing the amp to try to produce maximum output. In other words only when you have the volume cranked. Even then it's not holding there at maximum. Music is dynamic, it's lots of low to medium level material with some high level and occasionally maximum level material. So even at full volume 90% of a full song is low to medium level material, 7% is high level material and 3% is maximum level (depending on the music itself, how it was recorded and the quality of the recording. This is only an example). That means that even when you are listening to your music as loud as it can safely go that your amp is only outputting in its upper power ability 10 to 20% of the time. That's why we try to tell you that reading into and worrying so much about the numbers is such a waste of time. Trust me, I used to worry about every little number and everything years ago too. It wasn't until I spent a lot of time on here reading up on things, asking questions and talking to people that I realized that all my time and energy was focused on the wrong aspects. There are far more important, far more consequential things to worry about that make a much bigger difference than the power you're running to the speakers. That's not to say that what you're worrying about doesn't carry with it some merit but it should be lower on the scale than things like HOW the speakers are installed. Things like location, aiming, deadening, and many more items are the sum of HOW they're installed. The closer that stuff is to as good as it can get the better the overall result no matter how much power you run or things of that nature.