Advantages Of High Voltage Operation

As mentioned earlier, high voltage lines reduce power loss due to cable heating. This is because the speaker cables recognize audio signals as low current, so you can use smaller gauge speaker cables, or very long cables to prevent losing too much power.

Another advantage of running at high voltage is that you can more easily provide matched loads to the amplifier. Let's say you are connecting dozens of speakers to a single 8-ohm amplifier output. It may be difficult to wire the speakers in a series-parallel combination with a total impedance of 8 ohms. It is also bad practice to run speakers in series because if one speaker fails, all of them will not work properly. This changes the load impedance that the amplifier recognizes.

With a high voltage system, you can connect hundreds of speakers in parallel on a single amplifier output if you provide a matched load. In addition, high voltage distributed systems are relatively easy to design, and because there are multiple taps on the Dry Type Transformer, the power settings are flexible.

Dry transformers are not the only way to get high voltage from an amplifier. Because some amplifiers have built-in dry-type transformers, while others provide high voltage, dry-type transformerless (direct) outputs.