How to Set Up a Power Amplifier

Video Transcript

I answered tons of questions seemingly every day, at least every week about how much power amplification given in a situation will need. And that is a pretty big topic because I need to know more about your space and what you are going to be using your power amplifier for. But it is a good idea to remember that every time you double your wattage, so if you have a 100 watt amplifier which is a pretty small amplifier these days and you get a 200 watt amplifier your potential head room, your gain for volume is decibels, is 3. You need 10 decibels gain to actually double your volume so if you are looking for a louder system, doubling your wattage from what you have isn't going to give you very much. Now the important thing to know about power amplification as far as hooking it up is this. You should find on the back of your power amplifier a rating. This amplifier is a 200 watt amplifier and it says 4 ohms RMS. A long of them will say minimum load, 4 ohms, 8 ohms or 2 ohms or whatever. That means that the combined resistance because ohms is resistance, this is a symbol of impedance, the combined resistance of all of your speakers that you are running into 1 channel cannot equal less than 4. Now when you have a 4 ohm speaker and a 4 ohm speaker and if you daisy chained them which means you are leaking them together from one speaker to the next and then in to your amplifier, that combined 4 plus 4 equals 2 in speakers ohmages or adding up resistance. So that would potentially cause damage to your amplifier. You need to keep it at 4. So if you have 2 8 ohm speakers, 8 plus 8 into 1 channel will equal 4. Of course as far as your outputs go, this particular amplifier as speak on outputs. This is banana plug. These are still outputs. As far as how far do you turn up your power amplifier, most manufacturers will want you to maximize everything you've go. So if you buy an amplifier, they will tell you to turn this up 3/4 percent. That might be where it runs the most efficient. But given the space of your room and the fact that from all of the equipment that we've shown you so far, has some sort of a gain control. The question is where do we take the gain. Do we maximize our gain at the power amplifier or at the pre-amplifier or at the channel faders or at the master faders or where ever. The general rule in gain structure and we can do a very long video on this but we are just going to do a brief idea, is to maximize your signal flow at each stage of your gain.

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