Shopping Hints For Stereo Amplifier Products

| Sunday, November 24, 2013
By Mike Heller


If you have paid a good deal of money on a pair of good-quality speakers, you want to be sure that you get an amplifier which will deliver excellent audio quality while meeting your budget. I will present some tips on the subject of audio amp products to assist you make the right purchasing decision. Audio amplifiers appear in all different shapes and sizes. They employ different technologies and have countless technical specs. This makes it difficult to decide which model to pick. You don't have to be a specialist. Just follow some easy guidelines and you ought to be pleased with your amp.

It is hard to select the perfect audio amp because of the large amount of models. All of these models have different specs. They are based on different technologies and come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. By following some simple suggestions, you will be able to select the type that best fits your application and budget.

The huge majority of today's audio amps are solid state amplifiers as opposed to more traditional tube amplifiers. Tube amplifiers have been dominant a decade or so ago. Regrettably, tube amplifiers have quite large audio distortion which describes how much the audio signal is degraded by the amp.

Nearly all of today's audio amplifiers are based on solid-state technology while a small portion is based on tube technology which has been popular over a decade ago. Unfortunately, tube amplifiers have quite high audio distortion which describes how much the audio signal is degraded by the amplifier.

Harmonic distortion of tube amps is often as large as 10%. Solid-state amplifiers will have lower audio distortion. However, distortion will depend on the particular audio amplifier technology. The most conventional amps use a "Class-A" and "Class-AB" technology. These amplifiers are also called "analog amplifiers". Audio amps which are based on these technologies normally have low harmonic distortion. Moreover, this technology is relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, the downside is that the power efficiency is merely in the order of 20% to 30%. Power efficiency describes how much of the electrical power is used to amplify the audio as opposed to being wasted as heat. Amplifiers with low power efficiency will require quite big heat sinks because most of the power is radiated.

When choosing an amplifier, ensure that the output power is sufficient to drive your speakers. The required power will be determined by how much power your loudspeakers can tolerate as well as the size of your room where you will be listening. Speaker power handling is given as peak power which denotes the greatest amount of power during short bursts whilst average power refers to how much power the loudspeakers can handle continuously.

If your listening area is fairly small then you might not require to drive your loudspeaker to its rated power handling value. You would almost certainly be ok having an amplifier that can offer 20 to 50 Watts although your speakers may be able to tolerate 100 Watts of power. Low-impedance loudspeakers generally offer high sensitivity and are less difficult to drive to high volume than high-impedance loudspeakers. Check your amplifier manual to make sure that your amp can drive your loudspeaker impedance.

Other important parameters are the signal-to-noise ratio and frequency response which should be in the order of at the least 100 dB signal-to-noise ratio and 20 Hz to 20 kHz frequency response for high-quality amplifiers.




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