Parasound Halo JC-1 -VS- Bryston 7B-ST?

Daltonlanny's comment is particularly apropos, in that accidents do occur, and that crossing speaker terminals accidently is very easy to do: plastic terminal caps that are only hand tightened, jumpers that come loose from bass vibration,et. But shouldn't these high end amps be able to shut down before circuit damage is done? My Yamaha RX-Z1 Home theater amp has had it's terminals crossed by me many many times due to the weight and quantity of speaker cables. The amp simply shuts down and a mesage appears on the screen "check speaker cables". The same with my McIntosh mc501's.It is virtually impossible to fry them. I had and still have some of the older Parasound amps, and if an event occurred, surge, terminals crossed, etc. the worst that would happen is I would simply blow a fuse. I never blew a circuit.I am not an electrical engineer but it seems with today's technology that protecting circuits should not be that difficult. I don't know.

Ruka, I think you are partially right. There are many run of the mill amps out there that don't get damaged from crossed terminals. They just shut down. Turn 'em on, they work fine. High power amps have more current movin' thru, so more potential for damage. That said, if an amp is properly designed it should be protected against self destruction. A good designer should know how to design the protection circuits to prevent this. I knew several tech guys who played around with amp modding and designs. One of their pet peeves was high style designers who thought they knew it all but these guys would show me the weaknesses in their designs. Couple years ago I borrowed some JC amps from an audio friend. I thought the toggle switches were cheesy as were the binding posts. They sounded good, but they had some veiling and grain. Yeah,I know all the talk about thousands of hours of burn in, but this guy had them on playing music like 24-7, so they had lots of hours already. After borrowing them, i didn't think they lived up to the hype. One day he called me to tell me one blew up. I looked at it, and there was burned up stuff on the boards. He said it just happened while they were on playin' tunes. I had wished my techie friends were around to take a peak, but they all moved and I moved....

Accidently ground a binding post on a JC1 to the chassis and all it does is blow the two 12amp fuses, F7 and F8, on the main circuit board. How do I know this? 'Cause I'm a "techie." I've been wrenching on electronics for 18 years. There's nothing "cheesy" about the "low voltage" toggle switches and the Vampire binding posts are just fine. The problem with the power switches changing color does NOT, in any way, effect the amps performance. They made a change to the D6 zener diode on the ac/protect board and front panel blue power LED which fixes this problem. Anyone who says these amps are veiled and grainy either hasn't gone thru the full 1400 (yes, 1400) hour break-in or has "issues" elsewhere in their system.