Why do speakers improve with more powerful amps?

@sejodiren

I’ve had a couple folks tell me in the 10’s Dahlquist group TELL me I need 200 wpc and my amp will never drive them to their capability. MY ears know what I’m hearing. How would they know?

Here’s what they might know: they tried powering the speakers at 200 wpc level and it improved things for them.

This happened to me -- I had what I thought was a good level of power for my speakers. They sounded good to me.

Someone else said they would sound better with more power. I asked why?

They said, "Because I tried what you have and it sounded good to me, but when I tried it with more power, it sounded better in a way I could not have imagined."

This is why others’ experience is valuable. Because the metric of "good for me" may be limited, and others who have experienced more can help shine a light.

It’s not about them telling me "what I should hear."

It’s about them telling me that "there may be more to explore."

And that’s how they would know about your speakers.

@mlsstl 

Attempting to impress others or change their minds results in meaningless debate and frustration, both a waste of your time.

This should be emblazoned at the top of every thread!

@mapman Wrote:

In any case it’s always better to have more power than needed than less. That’s called headroom and is a real engineering concept and not just marketing. You can look it up!

I agree! See articles Below:

Mike

https://www.cieri.net/Documenti/JBL/Technical%20Notes/JBL%20Technical%20Note%20-%20Danger,%20Low%20Power.pdf

http://diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/Papers/Damping-Damping-Factor-and-Damn-Nonsense-Floyd-Toole.pdf

+2 @akg_ca

Roger from Rogers High Fidelity had an interesting comment somewhere about amps operating in their "sweet spot" of sort of a median power delivery, and noted as an example that very powerful amps into efficient speakers don’t get the amp into its best tone zone. Not his exact words but I get it.

@wolf_garcia I get it as well. I recently upgraded my tube integrated to a much more powerful Rogers EHF-200 MKII to power my Harbeth’s - what an idiot I am for buying such inefficient speakers:)

I now have the luxury of virtually unlimited headroom (yes, that marketing term again) and it definitely hits its sweet spot - but that is no where near its max rated output.

It’s apparent when one reads threads like this that everyone has an opinion but only some have science and facts to actually backup their opinions.

That’s just the way it is but my only suggestion would be everyone is always best served by at least valuing the science and principles that account for how things actually work and doing the best they can to apply common learnings in their case as best they can. That’s the happy path to success. Anything otherwise is a detour at best and a dead end road in the worst case.