Raman amplifiers and Fiber optical parametric amplifiers (FOPA) are positioned as the main future leading techniques for all-optical signal amplification. Distributed Raman amplifiers are known as the least noisy, but this type of amplifiers suffers from poor pumping efficiency at low input signal powers, therefore, discrete (lumped) Raman amplifiers (LRA) could be used instead. Both FOPAs and LRAs are the likeliest replacements of conventional EDFAs, but at this point it is not clear which of these two approaches is the most promising taking into account the quality of the amplified signal. Therefore, the goal of this article is to determine which of the two amplification techniques ensures less amplifier produced signal impairments in a 16-channel 10 Gbps dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) transmission system.