Electrical Engineering

Generally, an amplifier or simply amp, is any device that changes, usually increases, the amplitude of a signal.  An Amplifier receives a signal from some pickup transducer or other input source and provides a larger version of the signal to some output device or to another amplifier stage. An input transducer signal is generally small (a few millivolts from a cassette or CD input or a few microvolts from an antenna) and needs to be amplified sufficiently to operate an output device (speaker or other power-handling device). In small signal amplifiers, the main factors are usually amplification linearity and magnitude of gain , since signal voltage and current are small in a small-signal amplifier, the amount of power-handling capacity and power efficiency are of little concern. A voltage amplifier provides voltage amplification primarily to increase the voltage of the input signal. Large-signal or power amplifiers, on the other hand, primarily provide sufficient power to a...