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Picked up an older Rockford Fosgate RFP-2000 High Current home amp


avguytx

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Yesterday I picked up a rather rare older Rockford Fosgate RFP-2000 High Current home amplifier that was the home version of the original Power 1000 car amplifier. From what I understand, this one is about as rare as hens teeth and sports 32 MOSFET outputs and is rated at 200wpc, I believe, and always tested higher. So as time goes, while we're building our new house, I'll tinker with it and post some more pictures.

 

From what I've read, it has a huge torodial transformer inside and weighs in around 40lbs or so. It's pretty hefty for sure. More power than what my Belle's actually need but may see what it sounds like one day on them. It will definitely work well on the other lesser efficient speakers I have.  May not be a lot of interest in this amp for some but it's definitely not something you see every day.  

 

 

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Yeah, I had completely forgotten they made this model back when the original Power 1000's were out but I do remember the Rep trying to get us to stock a couple.  Would be way cool if I could ever find the matching preamp but I bet that will be slim to none of a chance.  I'll try to pop the cover later today when I get home and get some pics under the hood.  I'm curious to see if it looks as good under there as the outside does....hardly a scratch on it.  The gain knobs on the back are the same that were used on the old Punch 45, 75 and 150's plus the Power 300, 650 and 1000's.

 

Space is kind of slim in the tiny rent house we're in right now but once new one is done, I'll have some space to display some "toys" and I'll have an indoor workbench upstairs to  tinker at.  I might hook it up on some sacrificial speakers and see what happens...."after" I look underneath.  ha

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They made a home processor as well.  I believe under the Fosgate audionics name.  I had the original Fosgate (prior to Rockford Fosgate) PR-2100II car amplifier and I was the envy of all my friends.  50W x 4 or 100W x 2 was not common in 1978 in the car audio world with a separate pre-amp.  I had to take my cassette deck to a tech and have him solder the 5 pin DIN plug to the preamp section in order to feed a proper signal to the preamp to feed the amp.

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I've got some other speakers, JBL L100t3's, Infinity RSIIIb's, and Infinity Quantum 3's, at my best friends house that have been there since I moved back to AR from TX in late 2009.  Some of those might pair up well with that amp.  Probably be similar to the Soundcraftsmen A5002 amp (and DX4200 preamp) that I have over there, too.  Both of those were completely gone through and updated and the amp is a beast at 250x2 @ 8-ohm.   It'll be more fun tinkering when I have the space.

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I tried to get the bottom cover off but, oddly enough, the allen heads were just like I remember them with the old RF car amps...weird size and hard to remove.  It's like between a 2mm and 2.5mm and nothing I had in standard size would fit.  Seems like we used to use torx heads to remove them so I'll have to check that tonight.  The amp is the same thing as the Rockord/Hafler RF-2000 internally as shown by that circuit board so from what I've gathered, this is quite the rare bird.  There was an RF-2000 amp with RF-200 preamp out years ago which was quite attractive.  Here's a link to that.  There's (2) 42,000mfd caps for the power supply underneath the bottom side from what I've read.

 

I wish I would have bought some of the Fosgate Audionics stuff back when I was the RF rep and they were closing it out.  There were some killer deals on that gear.

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The amp is pretty clean overall and that upper section didn't really show any signs of stress.  I just wanted to check out the bottom side before I fire it up and may have to go find my dim bulb tester in storage and check it that way to start.  I'm going to call Rockford as a good friend of mine for over 20 years (and past coworker) used to be the Rockford rep and also worked at Rockford in Tempe.  He and I were both reps at the same time from around 2001 till 2004 and then he went to work for RF and I stayed with the rep firm.  But, one of the guys that original built the amps is still there and may have the service manual on it.  Worth a try...

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Sweet.  I was able to get the last available documentation on the amplifier and quite a bit of history on it from Rockford and the design of it based on the Power 1000 car amp by John France.  Very cool.  It's not going to be the easiest to take apart and there's no real documentation except for a word document one of them put  together about it.  Also not much for a service manual other than the board layout so it will be a little beyond me to bench.  The main thing he said was to bring it up on a variac and listen for the huge toroid transformer to hopefully not be buzzing.  Those were custom made by some company specifically for that amp and he said that's one of the biggest he's ever seen go into an amplifier....at least in the early 90's.  He definitely recommended an electrolytic cap replacement which makes sense in being 25+ years old.

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I plugged the amp in on Saturday just to see what happened but it stays in protect on powering it up.  Someone in its past was kind enough to bump up from the 5 amp called for fuses to 15 amp.  Nice of them.  But, I don't have much in it so it can be decoration in my upstairs room.  I called the tech in Little Rock that rebuilt my Mac MC250 amp and he wasn't really thrilled with working on a MOSFET amp.  He said, "you can breathe on those things wrong and it'll give the MOSFET a reason to fail."  haha  No biggie.

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  • 9 months later...

These amplifiers have a cooling system that requires a significantly higher input signal voltage than the average preamplifier puts out. After seeing a full rack of these at a local performance venue in Phoenix, the venue owner sold me 8 of these for a hundred bucks apiece for being prone to overheating and underperformance in his shows. Two of the amps had actually been damaged internally as the result of cooling related issues.  Turns out these amps were virtually bulletproof if you supply them with a hot input signal and not some stock preamp level.  The amps were intended to be paired with the RF-200 preamp,  not some average equipment.  

 

MAKE SURE YOU CHECK YOUR INPUT SIGNAL LEVELS IF YOU WANT THIS AMP TO BLOW YOU AWAY. 

 

HAVE FUN

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  • 4 weeks later...

@bentech8989  Thanks for that information.  I have some good friends in the Phoenix area (Gilbert, Tempe, Chandler) that worked for Rockford for a great many years.  I keep an open search on e b a y for the RF200 preamp for "reasonable" pricing as it would be nice to match it up to the amp.  When I last powered it up, it just went into protection mode and I haven't gone anywhere with it from that point.  I'd love to get it working and that may be tough with such minimal info and techs that are even familiar with it.  There were some things a tech told me at a shop in Phoenix to try but, at that time, we were building our new house.  I'm hoping soon I can dig into it a little as we are in the new house now. 

 

My main 2 preamps are an Onkyo P-3000R and also a fully modified Carver C-1 (BillD mods, etc) but the Onkyo is mainly used.

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  • 1 month later...

Not sure if there is still any interest for this?  But I have the full system offered from back in late 80’s.  I have the rf200, rf2000, Hafler SE150, Hafler DH330 & a pair of electrostatic tower speakers.  It was quite a little system in its day.  Message me if anyone is interested in it.  It’s just been sitting for years now.  But everything worked last I used it.  The boards for the speakers might need a little repair.  I seem to remember highs cut out now & again.  And yes, the amp weighs a ton! Lol.  I probably have the original manuals with tech specs (I think) somewhere.  If there is interest, I will put some effort into digging them up.  😊

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  • 3 weeks later...

Replaced most all of the small electrolytic on the power supply board and main board over the last few days. I didn't replace the two 42,000uf PS caps though.  Most all of the caps were 15 to 20% over spec but there were a couple that didn't even read on my Fluke. That would explain why one channel had kind of worked and the other was noisy. 

 

Bottom line, amp is hooked up and working. :)

 

 

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Although I did order this 52 pound Onkyo amp earlier this week.  Probably won't get it till end of next week with most manufacturers being in Denver for CEDIA convention.  Looking forward to seeing how it sounds. 

 

With all the new caps, this ol' Rockford amp does sound good, though.

 

 

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  • 4 months later...

I have the RF2000 amplifier and used to own the pre-amp.  This one doesn't  have the rack mounting nor the "pro" Mic. type inputs.  It works ok and I'm using it in bridged mono mode.   There is some static sound heard when output is low.  Anybody have a service manual connection to share.  I think it is a problem with the RCA inputs...thanks.

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