JingleDjango
Well-known member
I hope this is the appropriate section for this question:
I'm studying recording in school. In the live sound course, in our discussion of power amplifiers the instructor was adamant that the output of a power amplifier is a DC current. This is giving me a bit of cognitive dissonance because my understanding of audio signals is that they are fundamentally oscillating between + and -. I believed that the input stage received an AC signal of very low voltage/current and the output stage ideally spit out the same signal, but with greater amplitude (More positive voltage on the upswing, lower negative voltage going down).
http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/whats_under_the_hood_power_amplifier_sections_connectors_classes/P3/ <- This page suggests that the output can be either pure AC or a varying DC signal depending on the output class. But how would the loudspeakers respond to that DC offset, which would have to be quite great to lift the entire audio signal above 0Vground. Naturally if the output is transformer balanced then none of that DC energy should make it out of the box anyway!
Any help in wrapping my head around this conceptually would be appreciated!
I'm studying recording in school. In the live sound course, in our discussion of power amplifiers the instructor was adamant that the output of a power amplifier is a DC current. This is giving me a bit of cognitive dissonance because my understanding of audio signals is that they are fundamentally oscillating between + and -. I believed that the input stage received an AC signal of very low voltage/current and the output stage ideally spit out the same signal, but with greater amplitude (More positive voltage on the upswing, lower negative voltage going down).
http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/whats_under_the_hood_power_amplifier_sections_connectors_classes/P3/ <- This page suggests that the output can be either pure AC or a varying DC signal depending on the output class. But how would the loudspeakers respond to that DC offset, which would have to be quite great to lift the entire audio signal above 0Vground. Naturally if the output is transformer balanced then none of that DC energy should make it out of the box anyway!
Any help in wrapping my head around this conceptually would be appreciated!