Rockford Fosgate Showcase 2007

21st May 2008 Adam Rayner

The 2007 line of Rockford is incredibly more powerful than ever before, both in DSP cunning and sheer lunatic watts. Adam Rayner wonders how fifteen thousand watts would fit in his estate car?
Instructions for use: For information on the stuff they make and an overview of the whole product range. Check out the main article. For showing off in public how much you know about the stuff and the brand; Read Instant Expert section first. Otherwise skip straight to The Lowdown.
Rockford Fosgate was started up by an engineering genius named Jim Fosgate, in a garage in Arizona. In 1973 the first thing with his name on came out. It was the Punch EQ box. Semi-retired, he’s still to be found in the RandD section at the headquarters building in Tempe from time to time. The brand may just be the single most famous high end car electronics name worldwide. More people have Rockford tattoos than any other brand. (Neil Kelly of BBG is one!) They have supported competitions, both in Sound Quality and also SPL (sheer loudness!) in many directions for a long time and were the first well known thousand watt amp maker with their original shiny Power Thousand. It had a long chromed shroud with a blunt looking power meter that lit up on the front and Bob Hobson had one in his Cossie-alike Sierra back in the eighties! That Punch EQ that started as a stand-alone product was later either a fixed circuit in the amps, or else a switchable circuit and is now subject to wired remote control knobs. The actual curve remains as up to an 18dB lift at 45Hz (well throbby) and a ‘hinge’ filter from 1kHz to 20Khz to provide up to an extra 12dB at 20kHz. Jim got a Technology and Engineering Emmy award in 2003 and to this day, all the amps are designed and made in Tempe, AZ, USA. RF have evolved their technologies just about every year, so that you can always date a system’s Rockford product to the range and when it was sold. This season’s tech is all about incredibly efficient use of 12 Volt power, traditionally used at a very low percentage of efficiency. They reckon their noob is good for 15 kilowatts whilst drawing ‘only’ 300 amperes of 12v DC. Arooga!
The footprint of the new amplifiers is bizarrely small. Their Class bd mono range has a 1500 watt bass monster that can be joined to one of its brethren to feed just one speaker that is so small it could be taken for a 300 watter of a year or so ago. The brochure no longer has robot dogs and techno monsters in it but rather shows images in smoky sexy tones with minimalist photography of the purest art grade.
As ever, the RF product is divided into subs, amps and speakers with the entry level being the Punch series, which itself comes in three price levels ascending from Punch1 to Punch2 to Punch3 for the woofers and the Power designation which remains their top end product. Here’s the posh stuff first;

‘POWER’ SUBS come in 10 inch to 15 inch sizes and have cast chassis and are rated for between 800w and one thousand watts RMS, so these are all heavy duty items. The cones are Aluminium metal and they all have dual voice coils in either 2 or 4 ohm configuration as well as dual mirror-image suspension spiders. This means they absolutely kick arse and can be hooked up to suck amplifiers inside-out. The have fat 8 gauge wire inputs and the tinsel wires that take the watts to the coils are embedded within the spiders – they are engineered like brick outhouses – SOLID. Best of all is the mad-looking parabolic suspension surround at the top. It is an inherently more linear design so these woofers push air better than ones that don’t have this feature. These are definitely an enthusiast product. PRICE RANGE £240 to £500

‘POWER’ SPEAKERS & COMPONENTS have cast chassis and 12dB per octave crossovers with a cap and a coil, not just a capacitor. They range from 4 inch to 6×9 and from 40w to 110w rms power handling. The components have handsome crossovers with clear plastic backs and chromed cases with the RF logo raised into it. I would wonder how best to install these to show them off. The bar-style grilles are heavy duty looking and are fixed by Allen-headed bolts which always looks ‘engineeringy’ and makes them ooze class. PRICE RANGE £75 to £270

‘POWER’ AMPLIFIERS include fan cooled models and ones with small footprints but relatively heavy duty heatsinks. There are two 2 channellers called T400-2 and T600.2 that are good for 120w and 200w per channel; two four channellers that muster 60w or 100w per channel, called the same number but finishing in a ‘4’. A five hundred watt and a 1,500 watt monoblock called T500-bd and T1500-bd are the big bass machines. Of the forced air cooled models, there’s one 50w four channel animal called T8004 and three monoblocks that at one ohm bridged loads throw out one, two or four kilowatts! Even their regular ratings are huge, with the T1000bd offering 500w @ 4 ohms, the T2000bd making 750w and the mighty T4000bd creating 2,000w. These can all do ‘Power Sync’ and ‘Master Sync’. Which sounds like bdsm games to me but hey, they are darn hectic thingies. PRICE RANGE £230 to £1300
The About-to-be-legendary T15kW is a £19,999.99 product that is good for fifteen thousand watts peak! It uses only 300 amperes of current to do so, which is amazing. It has 12dB per octave Butterworth crossovers and fat 1/0 gauge power cable inputs. Built to order, here are the specifications of madness: 500w x4@4ohm; 1000w x4@2ohm; 2000w x4@1ohm; 3750w [email protected]; 2000w x2 @ 2 ohm bridged; 4000w x2@2 ohm bridged; 7500w x2@1 ohm bridged. It’s insane and you read it here first.

‘PUNCH’ AMPS have outputs ranging from 200w to a kilowatt for the biggest monoblock into an ohm. They all have fat eight gauge speaker terminals and four gauge power connectors. They wear their heatsink up one end and the monoblock P1000-1bd can be bridged into that aforementioned one ohm. The other mono model is the P300-1, which is good for 300w at 2ohm bridged. The basic range structure is two channellers in 50w x2, 100w x2 & 125w x2 called P200-2 and 400 and 500 -2, with a 4×50 watter called P400-4 made of two of the innards of the P200-2. The signal to noise ratio is declared at equal to or greater than 105dB, which is into the true HiFi zone; go check. Most makers, even pukka ones rarely very dare claim more than 100dB. They have crossovers that range from 50Hz to 500Hz. Rockford’s Punch amp is also the home to the Punch EQ2, the second generation. They can also operate this remotely via the optional remote. The Original Core Product from way back when they would put 22 speakers on huge passive crossover systems on one 2x22watt amp and call it “The Rockford Way.” PRICE RANGE £190 TO £370

‘PUNCH’ SUBS come in three levels of build, as described. The Punch 1 stuff covers 8/10/12/15 inch sizes in single four or eight ohm voice coil configurations. They have a transparent cover over the cone you remove only upon final installation. All eat 150w rms except the fifteen which can use 200w, although all have the same 1.5inch voice coil. The P2 product comes in the same range of sizes and can use 250w rms, except the eight that can use only 200w and they are all dual 2 or 4 ohm voice coil designs. The P3 shallow subs are just that for skinnier locations and come in 10 and 12 inch size only although they can be ordered in 2 or 4 ohm dual voice coil. Regular P3 subs are heavy duty items with 400w and 500w rms power ratings. In 10/12/15 sizes they have dual voice coils (4/8 ohm) and 2.5inch voice coils across the three. They have huge 14mm Xmax ratings, which means they go in and out along way. PRICE RANGE £50 to £210

‘PUNCH’ SPEAKERS & COMPONENTS are the affordable end of Rockford-ness yet they are seriously well made and good looking with red anodised pressed steel frames and covers over the magnets. They start with a 3.5inch and go up to 6×9 and have between 15w and 75w rms power handling. A single capacitor gives a simple 6dB per octave crossover slope for the tweeters. The best sets get two tweeters that look the same but from what I can grasp, run at slightly different passbands so as to make a smoother, wider range sound. The tweeters can be dismantled, making these some of the oddest speakers around. Component sets with dual HF drivers? Unheard-of but Rockford do them. PRICE RANGE £50 to £150

‘PUNCH’ LOADED BOXES are very handsome and definitely well made items. The ones on sale in the UK are the single and dual loaded 12 inch models. They feature high flow, low noise port designs with nice laminar flow of air in and out and are computer-aided in their design. Instant street credibility and an easy resale as this is posh branded kit. PRICE RANGE £146 to £300

THE SIGNAL PROCESSORS are called the 360.1 &360.2 and are a technical tour de force. You can actually tune your car by PDA (or laptop) while sat in your car. They support Windows Mobile, Palm OS5 and of course Bluetooth technologies and are monster-clever EQ and crossover items. They feature RCA and high level inputs for better OEM integration, auto EQ and channel summing; front dual 31 band equaliser; dual rear 28 band equalisers; 10 bands of subwoofer graphic EQ; an auxiliary 31 band equaliser and Front/rear crossovers at 12 or 24db per octave. Time alignment is available in all channels and the Bluetooth gives you computer control. Awesome. Two levels, one has more crossovery than the other. PRICE RANGE £250 or £440

Quality passives on coaxials

Cunning 360 DSP series