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If you have spent a good deal of cash on a pair of good-quality speakers, you wish to be sure that you get an audio amplifier that will offer brilliant sound quality while meeting your budget. I will provide a few pointers regarding audio amplifier devices to aid you make the best purchasing decision.

Audio amps appear in all different shapes and sizes. They use different technologies and have numerous technical specs. On the other hand, you don’t need to be a specialist to choose the perfect model. By following some fundamental rules you won’t regret your purchasing decision.

Amplifiers vary in their size and range from types that will take up a good portion of your living room while some of the latest mini amplifier models are as small as a deck of cards. A large number of amplifiers are the size of a regular rack. This permits your amplifier to be stacked on top of your other audio equipment.

There are some core amplifier technologies available. One technology is named “solid-state”. Solid-state amps now make up for the greater part of audio amplifiers. In the past, tube amplifiers have been popular. Even today tube amplifiers are still obtainable. Tube amplifiers, however, have a fairly high amount of harmonic distortion. Harmonic distortion describes how much the audio signal is degraded whilst being amplified. This expression is frequently used while evaluating the audio quality of amplifiers.

Tube amps will have audio distortion of up to 10%. Solid state amplifiers will have less audio distortion depending on the amplifier technology that is utilized. 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 named “analog amplifiers”. Whereas amps employing these technologies normally have low audio distortion, power efficiency is only 10% to 30%. Power efficiency refers to how much of the electrical power is actually utilized to amplify the signal. The remaining part is wasted as heat. An amplifier with low power efficiency will radiate the majority of its power as heat.

In contrast, “Class-D” amps which are also called “digital amplifiers” have a power efficiency of generally 80 to 90%. This enables the amplifier and power supply to be made a good deal smaller than analog amplifiers. The downside is that digital amplifiers frequently have higher audio distortion than analog amps. This is mostly a consequence of the switching distortion of the output power stage. Newest digital audio amplifiers, however, utilize a feedback mechanism and can minimize the audio distortion to below 0.05%.

The amp should be able to offer enough 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 denotes the utmost amount of power during short bursts while average power refers to how much power the speakers can handle continuously.

If you have a relatively small listening environment then 20 to 50 Watts of power should be sufficient although your speaker might be rated for 100 Watts or more. Low-impedance speakers generally offer high sensitivity and are easier to drive to high volume than high-impedance loudspeakers. Check your amplifier manual to ensure that your amplifier can drive your speaker impedance.

Two additional essential parameters to look at when picking an amplifier are signal-to-noise ratio and frequency response. Signal-to-noise ratio denotes how much noise the amplifier will generate and should be no less than 100 dB for a high-quality amp. The frequency response shows which audio frequency range the amp covers and should be at least 20 Hz to 20 kHz.

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