I guess it´s just one of those things that we have gotten used to and accepted. Really good amplifiers are really big.
Marketers of some amplifier companies know this and when opening one of the apple crate sized boxes, the content often inside is often minute in comparison.
So how large is large enough? Well let´s start with power. We previously talked about the power you might need for your living room setting 25W are plenty of power.
Les power means a smaller power supply and most of all a simpler transformer making it rather simple to make amplifiers small these days.
Another giant leap was the onset of digital amplifiers in the recent past. Other than transistor amps that amplify an analogue signal, digital amps, very quickly switch the signal on and off, about 300´000 times a second much faster than the ear can discern. Depending on how long the on part and the off part of the signal are in relationship to each other the bigger the average voltage. A little filtering smoothens out the thousands of spikes and turns everything into a truly audiophile signal. So how big is big enough for an amplifier? About the size of a pack of cigarettes, small enough to fit behind a sofa or under the carpet.
