What Are Solid State Home Theater Amplifiers and Their Types?

[Micheal Jorden]

While tube amplifiers are becoming increasingly popular among audiophiles, Solid State amplifiers still have the lion's share of the market place due to their smaller size, weight, heat output, and low maintenance.

Solid State amplifiers come in various iterations.

A Preamplifier is really a factor that takes all the signals from your own various sources (MP3 player, AM/FM/Satellite tuner, TV, DVD, CD, turntable, etc) and selects between those, controls the quantity, and performs any tone shaping.

The Power Amplifier may be the factor that supplies the Muscle 環繞擴大機.The bigger the power in Watts in the power amplifier, the louder, and cleaner, all else equal, the sound that you will hear.

To hold cost and/or overall space down, many audio enthusiasts combine the Preamplifier and Power Amplifier into one chassis, called an Integrated Amplifier. If your radio section can be inside, we will have a Receiver.

Solid State Amplifiers come in numerous Channels, each of these assigned to power one speaker. A conventional 2-Channel stereo amplifier is perfect for music listening with two speakers.

For Home Theater use, a 5 channel or 7channel amplifier will give you capacity to the Left, Right, Center, and two or four Surround speakers all in one chassis.

Ultimately, though, you simply come to an end of room in the amplifier chassis!

Fitting five to seven channels of Solid State Amplification into one amplifier is no hassle, with up to about 200 Watts per channel...enough for a big proportion of users.

For everyone seeking to obtain all the dynamic range possible from their music and movies, however, now more than 200 Watts per channel might be desirable.

The challenges now are size and weight. Engineering seven very high-power high-quality amplifiers in one practical amplifier is extremely difficult. Locating a area for this sort of huge, heavy beast is likely to be even harder!

For everyone uncompromising listeners, employing a suite of individual Monoblock single-channel Solid State Amplifiers, with one for every speaker, could be the ultimate choice. Just stack them up, each powering one speaker, to attain any total power level desired.

Additionally, having individual amplifiers for every speaker does away with any undesirable sound-bleed (crosstalk) between amplifiers channels completely, and allows unlimited growth for future needs.

Most Solid-State amplifiers are Direct Coupled, and thus the transistors are connected directly to the speakers, therefore it becomes very important to match the amplifier to your speakers.

Always be sure that the Impedance of your speakers (it should say something similar to 4-Ohms on a label on the trunk of the cabinet) matches with the Output Impedances Allowed by the amplifier manufacturer.

If the amplifier has Output Transformers, it may have connections for speakers of varied impedances, eliminating the necessity to concern yourself with any amplifier / loudspeaker impedance compatibility issues.