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How Small Can They Get? - The New Generation Super-Miniature Audio Power Amplifiers
New generation super-miniature amplifiers are a result of the same miniaturization that has caused computers and cell phones to shrink. While the features are growing, the size of today's consumer products is getting smaller and smaller. In the past, tube amps would be commonplace and take up a large part of the living room. Tube amps still have their fair share of fanatics. Nonetheless they have been replaced by solid-state amps for the most part.
Today’s amps integrate traditional pre-amps and power amps and assemble everything neatly in a single box no larger than a VCR. New developments in audio technology in regard to power efficiency of have allowed the development of a new generation of super-miniature audio amplifiers, such as Amphony’s microFidelity Model 100. Even though these amps are as small as a deck of cards, they are able to deliver up to 50 Watts power and without difficulty drive a speaker to full volume.
Past audio amplifiers with "Class-A" and "Class-AB" architectures have quite low power efficiency. Analog audio amplifiers by nature only convert a small portion of the power they consume - typically in the order of 20% to 30% - into audio whereas a large percentage is dissipated as heat. Therefore analog amplifiers require a reasonable amount of cooling. The amount of cooling depends on the amplifier rated output power. These heat sinks prevent the amplifier to be built into a small form factor.
Digital "Class-D" amplifiers offer higher power efficiency than analog amplifiers - normally around 80% to 95% - and thus can be miniaturized. One major downside of "Class-D" amplifiers is the fact that digital "Class-D" amplifiers use a switching stage at the output which creates non-linearity and consequently some amount of distortion of the audio signal. This disadvantage has slowed the progress of digital amplifiers.
Newer amplifier technologies have emerged such as "Class-T" and newer "Class-D" architectures. These technologies, such as the one used in Amphony's Model 100 provide for a feedback of the output signal to the amplifier input. By using this feedback, the amplifier can compensate for nonlinearities of the output stage. This allows the distortion to be reduced to levels similar to analog audio amplifiers. At the same time the amplifier provides the high power efficiency of digital amplifiers.
These new generation miniature audio amplifiers open up applications where previous amplifiers would fail, such as speaker installations where space is premium, such as in-ceiling speakers and applications that attach speakers to a cable box or DVD/MP3 player.
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