Power Bright ML400-24 400 Watt 24 Volt DC To 110 Volt AC Power Inverter

Why we love it?

400 watts continuous power 800 watts peak power

Some comments about this we saw on the web:

* /u/dezeroex on /r/BurningMan Hello! Did it look like this?

This year I powered it with 2 x 20AH 48V LiFePo4 batteries which is a slightly insane amount of battery. In the past I’ve used 8 x 22AH 12V SLA batteries which had roughly half the capacity I do now. I have them mounted beneath the frame which adds a lot of stability to the bike and was the only place I had room. Even then, that was probably enough to power the speaker alone for well over a day maybe closer to two? If you’re not powering wheel motors, you can go even smaller.

I step that voltage down to 24V with a 528Watt DC-DC voltage converter to power a 400 Watt 24V Inverter. The availability of physically small 48V inverters is extremely limited and I already had two of these (one spare) from when I used to run the bike at 24V. It’s a modified sine wave inverter and I’ve had zero issues with noise from it though your mileage will very with the quality of your amplifier’s power filtering. I’ve also used these inverters for this purpose for six years now with no failures. One additional advantage of this is the inverter won’t shutdown due to voltage sags which was more of a problem when the batteries were low when I used SLA. A huge problem with this though is it will run SLA batteries down and damage / destroy them so you ideally would want a Low Voltage Disconnect to protect the batteries (or always remember turn off the inverter when you’re not using it, which you won’t always remember to do.) I don’t have this problem with the LiFePo4 because they are protected and shut themselves off.

Contrary to what /u/wanderingross says, you don’t need to keep everything DC. Everyone always gets caught up about keeping everything DC and I used to do that too. I would look high and low for DC components and pay through the nose for them, or order direct from China, and it was endlessly frustrating. The advantage of AC is the components are cheap and plentiful. If you value your time in the slightest, put that money into a slightly bigger battery or a slightly bigger solar panel to make up the very small efficiency loss. Or better yet, just don’t worry about it.

Last I looked, the audio specs on car audio gear is a disaster. It was all marketing and zero actual specs. In the professional audio realm, the specs are actually specs. The QSC K series is also great for me because there is a plug for an external potentiometer to control the master volume on the amp. I believe the K.2 series dropped this.

Other things to note: pointing the speaker forward turns out to be the ideal positioning which I discovered by accident. You have much better control over where your sound goes. One good speaker is better than two not as good speakers. In fact, unless you’re wearing headphones or standing exactly equidistant between the speakers, mono will always sound better. This is another thing, similar to the DC/AC question, that people are consistently in error about.

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