Mackie’s all new FRS Series power amplifiers deliver phenomenal power at a price that won’t break the bank—and in a package that won’t break your back. In fact, each weighs just 22 pounds or less. Featuring our legendary Fast Recovery circuitry, the FRS Series cranks out clean, undistorted sound and the ultimate in punch and clarity—even when pushed to the limit. Each model features a high-current switching power supply that is super-efficient, and also ultra-lightweight, so you get maximum power with minimum load-in strain. Sophisticated protection ensures your FRS will always perform reliably, and that it will stay with you for the long haul. Stack them up against any competitor, and you’ll see, the FRS amps are simply the highest performing power amps in their class.

Fast Recovery, Fast Response
FRS amps feature sophisticated Fast Recovery circuitry for the cleanest sound around. At Mackie, we know that most folks run their amps right up to clipping levels, so we design our amps to handle this kind of real-world (ab)use. What we came up with is circuitry that allows the FRS amps to deliver ultimate power, without sacrificing sound quality. When you overdrive an amp with a traditional “negative feedback” design into clipping mode, it creates a feedback loop whereby even once you remove the input signal, the sub-stages of the circuits remain in saturation mode, causing all sorts of nasty harmonic distortion. The Fast Recovery technology in the FRS amps ensures all these sub-stages stay out of saturation, so even when the amp is driven into clipping mode, it instantly recovers, avoiding the “latching” phenomenon altogether. The result is ultra-clean, distortion free sound. Read more.

Ultra-Efficient, Lightweight Power Supply
The resonant switching power supply in our new FRS amps provides many sonic and practical advantages. Being much more compact and weighing considerably less than a conventional linear supply, it helps make our FRS amps super lightweight and ultra-portable. And while switching supplies are becoming more and more popular these days due to their more compact topology, not all switching power supplies are the same.

Many of our competitors use switching power supplies that employ “hard switching.” With this design, at switching, voltage is present across the transistor and current is running through it, generating “glitch” energy that can cause unwanted noise in the form of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI), as well as excess heat. The FRS power supply employs “soft” switching. The soft switching design includes a resonant tank that allows the power transistors to switch at zero current and zero voltage. This design ensures that when the transistors switch, very little heat or errant energy is generated, so the FRS amps run quiet as a mouse, and cool as a cucumber. This not only means better sound, but longer life. The resonant switching power supply operates more efficiently than other designs, too, allowing it to provide large bursts of power more quickly.

Complete Protection Circuitry
FRS amps come with complete system protection. We spent hours conceiving of all the possible what-if user scenarios, imagined all possible failure modes, then designed elaborate protection circuits to ensure that pretty much no matter what you do to our FRS amps, they will endure. Built into every FRS amp is a defeatable clip limiter plus short, under-impedance, over-current and thermal protection.

The power supply also includes real-time monitoring circuitry that keeps track of operating conditions in order to prevent over load failure. The circuitry “checks” the operating temperature, takes into account the maximum current, then manages the power supply accordingly, reducing the power if necessary to protect the power supply and amplifier. As a result, our FRS amps can actually throughput more power than our competitors’ models with the same power rating.

Many of our competitors rate power by “music power,” not sine wave power. If you drive some of our competitors’ amps using sine wave power at their supposed power rating, the amp will overload and “burn up.” Because of our protection circuits, under the same conditions, this simply won’t happen to FRS amps.

It’s never a good idea to overdo it with your amps, and we’re certainly not encouraging it, but in the chance you do push them beyond their limits, we’ve built the FRS amps to take it.