Most cheap amp ICs perform well when they're outputting less than a watt, with distortion barely audible. Try connecting the same amp board to your main HiFi sy

Most cheap amp ICs perform well when they're outputting less than a watt, with distortion barely audible. Try connecting the same amp board to your main HiFi system if you have one and do some listening tests against the original HiFi amp. Then turn it up and it's a completely different story. As always the speakers are the crucial part and having decent speakers will make a big difference. What a DSP can do is correct bad speakers to some degree. A typical cheap computer speaker has a muddy midrange, can't reproduce past 13 kHz or so, and has little bass due to the small driver. With DSP the manufacturer would typically low pass the amp input, smooth out the nonlinear frequency response, lift the bass a bit, and apply compression and limiting to increase perceived volume and protect the system. The results are still constrained by physics but the manufacturer is in this case able to save money on the drivers and box while getting similar sound quality.