How To Get The Best Bargain While Acquiring Music Amps

By Mike Heller


If you have paid a good amount of cash on a pair of good-quality loudspeakers, you wish to be sure that you get an amplifier which will offer superb audio quality while meeting your budget. I will offer a number of tips about audio amplifier technologies to help you make the correct purchasing decision. There is a flood of different audio amplifiers available that all differ in their specifications, shape and size. This makes it difficult to make a decision which type to select. You don't have to be a specialist. Just follow some plain guidelines and you should be satisfied with your amplifier.

Audio amplifiers are available in all different shapes and sizes. They employ different technologies and have many technical specs. Still, you don't need to be a specialist to pick the perfect type. By following some basic rules you won't regret your purchasing decision.

The vast majority of recent audio amps are solid state amplifiers as opposed to more conventional tube amps. Tube amps have been dominant a decade or so ago. Regrettably, tube amplifiers have fairly high audio distortion which describes how much the audio signal is degraded by the amplifier.

Tube amplifiers will have audio distortion of up to 10%. Solid state amps will have less audio distortion depending on the amplifier technology that is employed. Several of the most popular technologies in the past have been "Class-A" and "Class-AB" technologies. These technologies use different arrangements to amplify the audio. Amps based on any of these technologies are also called "analog amplifiers". This technology provides relatively small audio distortion. Though, the power efficiency is only 10 to 30%. This means that most of the electrical power provided to the amp is wasted as heat while a small fraction is used to amplify the audio signal.

Tube amplifiers will have audio distortion of up to 10%. Solid state amplifiers will have less audio distortion depending on the amplifier technology that is used. Several of the most popular technologies in the past have been "Class-A" and "Class-AB" technologies. These technologies use different arrangements to amplify the audio. Amps based on any of these technologies are also known as "analog amplifiers". Whereas amps employing these technologies typically have low audio distortion, power efficiency is only 10% to 30%. This means that most of the electrical power provided to the amplifier is wasted as heat whereas a small fraction is used to amplify the audio signal.

"Class-D" amplifiers, on the other hand, which are also referred to as "digital amplifiers" have a power efficiency of at least 80% and are smaller and have a smaller power supply than similar analog amplifiers. The downside is that many digital amplifiers have larger audio distortion than analog amplifiers though a number of of the most recent types utilize a feedback mechanism to reduce distortion to levels of 0.05% and less. The amp should be able to provide adequate output power to sufficiently drive your loudspeakers which will depend not only on how much power your speakers can tolerate but also on the size of your listening environment. Loudspeaker power handling is given as peak power which describes the maximum amount of power during short bursts while average power refers to how much power the loudspeakers can handle constantly.

If your listening area is rather small then you might not require to drive your loudspeaker to its rated power handling value. You would most likely be ok having an amplifier that can offer 20 to 50 Watts while your speakers may be capable to handle 100 Watts of power. Low-impedance loudspeakers normally offer high sensitivity and are simpler to drive to high volume than high-impedance speakers. Be sure that your amplifier can drive your loudspeaker impedance. You can easily find the rated speaker impedance range in your amplifier's user manual.

Additional significant parameters are the signal-to-noise ratio and frequency response which should be in the order of no less than 100 dB signal-to-noise ratio and 20 Hz to 20 kHz frequency response for high-quality amplifiers.




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