In the last few years there have been some audio amplifiers released which are extremely small. As a result, many people now use several audio amps, each of which is located right next to a speaker. This approach offers several advantages over using one bulky amp. In this post I will show some of these advantages. I will also offer some advice for properly setting up these amps.

If you are using a bulky audio amp, you will have to run long speaker cable. A long speaker cable has a fairly large inductance and as such may produce an inductive load which can degrade amplifier performance. Also, many digital miniature stereo amps create a fair amount of EMI on the speaker wires. The longer the speaker wire, the more EMI will be radiated. In fact, if you are running several long speaker cables then radiation from one cable can easily couple into an adjacent cable. This will further deteriorate audio performance.

A better solution is to use a series of small amps which are connected to a speaker each by using a short speaker cable run. In this case you will need to ensure that you distribute the audio properly to each amp. The best method is to use audio cable splitters.