I'm planning to play a few short sounds through a single speaker. The sounds will be triggered at various distanced by an Ultrasonic sensor as a person approaches. I want the sound quality to be decent, not like its coming from a tin can. What I'm trying to figure out is the best combination of sound shield (or not) and amp.
A simple solution is the Adafruit Wave Shield and maybe the Adafruit Mono 2.5W Class D Audio Amplifier - PAM8302. I suspect the quality would be reasonable with a speaker in an enclosure? I have a Wave Shield with a LM4889 amp, currently, and it doesn't sound great.
I see that some people have simply used an amp along with a separate card reader instead of using the Wave Shield. What are the advantages of the Wave Shield if simply hooking up an SD card reader and amp may be a simpler or cheaper build?
If the quality just won't be good enough using an Arduino amplifier, I could simply connect the headphone jack up to a normal stereo amplifier, but I want this project to be small, if possible.
I'd love to hear your opinions or solution ideas!