I’m not crazy about chips, but I’ve come to like the LM386. It is not really a little black mystery box — as the article points out, the internal circuitry is simple and completely understandable. So you shouldn’t feel any appliance-op angst when you use one of these.
http://hackaday.com/2016/12/07/you-can-have-my-lm386s-when-you-pry-them-from-my-cold-dead-hands/