Does Great Wireless Speaker Energy Efficiency Mean Great Cost?

If you are ready to buy brand new cordless speakers, you may be pondering how efficiently your cordless loudspeakers operate. I’m going to make clear exactly what the expression “power efficiency” stands for and also why you need to take a closer look at this number during your selection of new cordless speakers.

The less efficient your cordless loudspeakers are, the more power is going to be squandered which leads to a number of problems: Low-efficiency wireless speakers are going to squander a certain amount of energy as heat and therefore are more costly to use in comparison with high-efficiency products because of their larger energy consumption. To safeguard the circuit components, low-efficiency wireless loudspeakers must find ways to remove the heat that’s created. Commonly additional elements have to be included to dissipate enough power and sustain the optimum operating temperature. These elements usually are heat sinks as well as fans. Heat sinks as well as fans are heavy, use up room and also produce noises. Wireless speakers with low efficiency should not be put in tight spaces or inside sealed enclosures given that they require a good amount of circulation. Since low-efficiency wireless loudspeakers will produce merely a small percentage of the energy consumed by the amplifier as useful audio power, the amplifier requires a larger power supply than high-efficiency versions resulting in more expensive. Further, the thermal stress on the circuit board components as well as amplifier materials is much more serious and may lessen the reliability.

While purchasing a couple of wireless loudspeakers, you’ll find the efficiency in the data sheet. This figure is generally listed as a percentage. Various amp architectures provide different power efficiencies. Class-A amps are amongst the least efficient and Class-D the most efficient. Typical power efficiencies range from 25% to 98%. From the efficiency percentage it is possible to calculate the amount of energy the amplifier will waste. An amp with a 50% power efficiency will waste half of the consumed power. An amp that has 90% efficiency will waste 10%.

Take note, though, that efficiency depends upon just how much power the amplifier provides at a given moment. Each music amplifier is going to use up a specific amount of energy regardless of whether or not it supplies any power to the speaker. That is why the lower the energy the amp delivers, the smaller the power efficiency. For that reason audio manufacturers normally specify the efficiency for the highest audio power that the amplifier can supply.

In order to determine the power efficiency, the audio energy that is consumed by a power resistor which is attached to the amp is divided by the overall energy the amp consumes whilst being fed a constant sine wave signal. Ordinarily a full power profile is plotted in order to display the dependence of the efficiency on the output power. For this reason the output power is swept through different values. The efficiency at each value is calculated and a power efficiency graph generated.

Whilst switching (Class-D) amplifiers have among the largest power efficiency, they tend to have larger sound distortion than analog audio amps and lower signal-to-noise ratio. Thus you are going to need to weigh the size of the wireless loudspeakers against the audio fidelity. Having said that, digital amps have come a long way and are offering better audio fidelity than in the past. Wireless speakers that make use of Class-T amps come close to the music fidelity of types which contain analog amps. Subsequently selecting a couple of wireless loudspeakers which employ switching amplifier with great audio fidelity is now feasible.

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