Too much power?


I have a wonderful system with a great amplifier, and yet auditioned a more powerful version of the same amp. It indeed seemed to have more punch and drive, but at the expense of playing it a bit too loud. As my current system I rarely play over 70 db, since it’s perfect at low levels. I wonder other than bragging rights, what does more power get you? Since we aren’t here for PA style sound, is there a reasonable limit to how much you will benefit from higher power/ more expensive and? Especially since tire just using one watt most of the time?

dain

All else being equal a more powerful amplifier provides:

The ability to play music at louder levels without losing response linearity or introducing clipping and strain distortion.  

The ability to maintain relative volume level going from a smaller room to a larger room and a greater distance from the listening position.

The ability to maintain a relative volume level and dynamic headroom going to a speaker with less efficiency and more difficult to drive.

The ability to provide more relative volume and dynamic headroom (ability to be heard above louder levels of room background noise and din).

The maggie 1.7 is a fine speaker, but you need at least 150 watts to drive them to their potential.  I moved up to the 3.7's and they sound better with 250 watts.

It's true, many home listening is at an average 1w with mid-sensitivity speakers in a medium-small room at 70SPL.  And listening to level-compressed popular music requires an instantaneous headroom of between 3 and 10dB, which is 2w to 10w max without clipping of peaks.  However the headroom of 20dB of acoustic music (orchestral, jazz) and movies peak at 100w.  Double or half that peak wattage for speakers that range from +3 to -3dB of typical sensitivity.

@dbakker  that’s an interesting observation. I was recently at a chamber orchestra concert playing in an exquisite hall. 4th row. All I could think is that this would sound better as a recording where I could turn it up! It was in the 70db peak region (I checked) I enjoyed it but how anyone in the 50th row would hear the piano (well it was a harpsichord )I have no idea. So how do you assume there’s some specific volume appropriate to any recording? If you want to study this you’ll find masterers really have no idea, and are currently being policed by streaming services that now stress dynamic range over sheer loudness as has been the norm for 50 years, but that could be a different topic.

OP,

It seems you are investigating the right things. I have had season tickets to the Oregon Symphony for ten years, 7th row center. Over this time the softest music slowly rises out of a black background and crescendos we’re a bit to much for my ears… where resolution is reduced because it is simply too loud… but we are talking about a couple seconds over many hours of concerts.

So, for me, this showed the audio levels that are appropriate. Only the very loudest crescendos being really loud and the very softest pieces coming out of the void. This gives you a base line of what a system should sound like. You want a dead quiet background  < 30db in your listening room and have the quietest pieces gently rise from this background, then the largest crescendos push the limit of when your ears start loosing differentiation. 
 

A full symphony is the key to gauging the sound pressure levels.

 

Your equipment, well  that is another story. The better it is, the more it will mimic the real world.