You asked "Does Crest design/ Make the Peavey amps for peavey or is it the other way around?" A simple question and in return you get a bit of a complicated answer that requires a bit of bio. Some on here are asking for it, so now is as good of a time as any. During the 70's I sold Crest and Peavey via a music store in Austin. I learned to respect and admire both brands. I ran the Crest amplifier department during the mid 80's through mid 90's. My first Crest was the 8001. The rest of the Pro line through the 10,001 was mine. Midway through the CA18 development is when the mid-life crisis hit. I left Crest and came to Peavey. A few years later Peavey bought Crest. Now I run both the Peavey and the Crest amplifier departments. Suffice it to say, lines get blurred between the two. The things I learned while designing the Crest 9200 carried over to your Peavey CS4080Hz. It's mostly a Crest 9200 output stage with a linear transformer limited to 4 ohm/ch capability. That in turn morphed into the Crest CC5500 with a two ohm rating. Hence the similarity you noted. We would like to keep the two brands uniquely separated, but I'm not going to burn Hartley dollars reinventing technology. When the price point allows, the Crest gets more stuff inside.

BTW, an amp that does continuous duty cycle is simply three times oversized. It just doesn't buy you enough to justify the extra weight and cost. I used to design them like that, as did many others until the late 90's. Touring companies kept beating me over the head fussing about my 160 pound amplifiers that they had to lug around. I finally saw the light.

Michael Hurd, yes to Blue Man Group. I've seen them five times. A heavy dose of BMG into my two 24" Fane subwoofers and two ButtKicker floor shakers hooked to two sub-harmonic synthesizers is required amplifier testing. Yes, the synthesizers are modified to generate one and two octaves below the fundamental. I also use clipped and compressed dance/techno music. My days of designing large disco's left me with a love for good in the chest kicks. Metal is also a requirement. Nightwish and After Forever are two favorites. Until one of my amplifiers passes all of these tests, the design is not complete.

Thanks for buying the 8002. Crest designed that one after I left, and before Peavey bought Crest. I have LOTs of respect for the QSC 9.0. Lack of PFC is a dollars per watt issue. The market decides. Ditto IPR6000 versus 8200 or 9200. Let the market decide. Peavey IPRs are made in China. Must say, their quality is very good. As for the technology, I have to stay zipped on that for obvious reasons.

I do appreciate your using the 10001. Hope you get it fixed some day. It has a level dependent bias system that cooks the outputs at low level. It was the second best sounding amp in the old Crest lineup for full range, despite the power level. Few noticed as they only used them for subs.

Guess who introduced Toshiba flat pack transistors to the pro audio industry? Me, Crest 8001 back in 1986.

Regards to all
JD Bennett

Taken from posts on the AV Science Forum 2010-2011