The 503 uses mosfets and I believe the 505 uses transitors(pills). That can usually sway people from one to the other. Some like the transistors because they usually don’t run as hot. That’s what I read and not from personal experience.
Ohhhhh lightbulb moment! So there is a distinguishing design difference between these amps. It makes much more sense. I am not educated on the mosfet vs BJT debate. Your comment spun me off to google searching through 10 tabs of information, but I can't find any solid consensus on whether a mosfet amp is going to be better or worse for my purposes than a BJT amp.
If anyone wants to weigh in on that, I'd request we *try* to focus on mosfet vs BJT
within the scope of RM Italy's two products I'm looking at and their reputation/perceived design and skills/capabilities. Not talking about whether a hypothetical home built amp would be better off using fets of BJTs, trying to figure out if RM Italy's two amps (503 and 505v) can be effectively differentiated based on the provided information about their design.
The higher cost of the 505v suggests that *should* be a better product but... better in what way? Does fets vs BJT tell us anything about which one will work better? Have cleaner/more stable signal? Last longer?
In trying (and failing) to become a 10 minute google expert I thought I read something to the effect that the BJTs would tend to have a longer life than mosfets. I can justify spending more money if it increases the likelihood of a longer period of service before it needs work/repairs.
It also seems likely that this design difference will have an effect on which one gets closer to its advertised power output, sounded like the mosfet design is more likely to get upwards of its 300 watt advertised output, if I understood what I read correctly.
Problem is everything I read suggested that it is so heavily dependent on the rest of the build and design quality that you can't make a blanket statement like "fets are better than BJTs". More like "A great designed mosfet amp is better than a poor quality BJT amp, but a really well made BJT amp could come out on top in certain aspects". Aspects which I can't recall now.
I keep going back and forth on this. Earlier today there was GREAT conversation going on via skip, I could hear lots of conversations crystal clear and they were conversations worth getting in on, but I couldn't reach anybody. Go upstairs and each lunch, come back down and turn the radio on again and now its back to some idiot screaming repeated nonsense so blown out and overmodulated you can't even tell what he's saying but he just keeps saying it over, and over, and over, and over, bleeding 3 channels in either direction to boot, the stock scanning function of my radio can't skip over it so no more scanning for legitimate contacts until that idiot with more watts than brain cells plays himself out.
When I finish my custom scanner add-on I'll be able to bypass moron traffic to find more of the good contacts and conversations. Still won't be able to reach anyone I find reliably unless I get this amp business sorted out.
