Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In fairness, I am an electrical engineer and design consumer electronics and this IS a very low cost amp. I was hoping to use this for some testing relating to my day job at home so I didn't have to get out one of my higher end and much larger amps. First I tested it on some speakers at the house. It distorted fairly quickly. But at reasonable volumes that some people would use it worked what seemed to be fine. However, I built a 20W load box with 8Ω resistors and took it to work where I have access to significant electronics including a $40K scope at my desk. I also have a recording studio interface hooked up to spectrum analyzer software. The first thing I noted on the scope was a LOT of 60Hz ripple coming from the wall wart. I am fairly sure it won't power the unit at full volume anyway. I hooked it up to a lab grade power supply which got rid of that problem. Next I saw a lot of high frequency noise on each channel. I plugged in a Tek arbitrary waveform generator to put in a sweep from 10Hz to 20KHz. I suspected it wouldn't be flat without using the switch to disable the tone controls. It wasn't flat anyway, especially on the low end with a slight boost. Not bad, just not flat. Listeners would not be disturbed by it. From memory it had about 30dB of crosstalk between channels in the high frequency region. I considered this unacceptable. Also one channel was around 10dB lower than the other. Again, unacceptable. I can't say as I would recommend this amp as it won't meet rated specs in any fashion. Distortion was an outlier too as it had distortion that went up and down depending on volume settings. At very low volumes you expect hi distortion and at maximum distortion (especially using the wall transformer). This had spots of 0.5% distortion at mid low and mid high. While hi distortion could be found at the lowest setting, highest settings and in the middle. Strange. Having said all that if you are REALLY not interested in hi fidelity and just want some noise this may work for you. It is small, inexpensive and I think it looks nice. My next move is to disassemble it and find out why it performs so poorly because the IC inside (per their manual) is a respectable performer for low wattage. I suspect I can make it work significantly better.