FIRST DECISIONS WHEN CHOOSING AN AMPLIFIER
Once upon a time, an amplifier’s job was simply to take the small signals from your sources and make them big enough to drive your speakers. That’s what amplification is. And in the world of hi-fi purism, that may be still pretty much all an amplifier does — those expensive often hulking mono power amps, for example, may have just a single input at one end, and outputs to your loudspeakers at the other, aiming as best as they can for the classic definition of “a straight wire with gain”.
Of course back when Quad’s Peter Walker came up with that phrase (supposedly*), it was assumed that the wire itself didn’t affect the sound — whereas these days that’s a whole other discussion.
But amplification is the heart of an amplifier, and generally responsible for the bulk of its price and certainly its weight, thanks to the transformer/s inside which provide the juice for that stepping up of signal size. This we can call
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