Why do speakers improve with more powerful amps?

@hilde45 Great points!  I appreciate that.  Had not thought about that side of the topic.I'm pretty much a 'noob' with regards to the technical side of this.  Have learned a lot from this forum though over the last couple years.  I read a lot but don't post much.  Thanks!

My 150 watt Herron M2 monoblocks sound better than 300 watt Ampzilla 2000 2nd edition monoblocks or PS Audio 350 watt M700 monoblocks with medium efficiency speakers. 

My 25 watt Quicksilver Horn monoblocks however sound better than the Herron amps with my Klipsch Chorus speakers.

Watts aren't everything. 

What  my tiny little mind his learned from all this herein is that amplifiers are really really important to sound quality.

The comment above from @yxcbandit about more amperage improving control over drivers, if true, and I believe it probably is, is very insightful. With more powerful quality amps, it follows that drivers are better controlled.

I also believe that frequency response is vastly improved because of a more powerful amps ability to deliver a greater ability to achieve this.

Also with all the complexities of the crossovers going on behind the speaker drivers, and the inherent voltage balancing going on between all the drivers, the spread of power to all the various drivers is likely enhanced with improved power capabilities. Crossover design Controls more than just frequency range distribution and is a topic that is not well focused on or understoodon in my view. Individual drivers within a speaker don’t all receive the same level of voltage otherwise things would not be in balance. I think this may greatly influence how amplifiers as well as crossover design may impact speaker performance.

@esarhaddon1 --

+1

@erik_squires wrote:

I recently asked a very similar question at DIYaudio and got some really in-depth responses which I felt really got to the root of the amplifier/speaker matching problem.

Take a look:

https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/if-speaker-impedance-wasnt-complete-what-are-we-missing.398934/

Good link/info, which further provided this:

I have a strong preference for line level active dividing networks ahead of the power amplifiers (Ref. 2, 12, 17). In this approach the power amplifier output is connected directly - except for a very low resistance speaker cable - to the voice coil of the driver. The amplifier takes maximum control over the motion of the speaker cone which gives a greater sense of clarity and dynamism compared to a passive dividing network between amplifier and driver. Active crossovers make much more effective use of amplifier power. A clipping woofer amplifier is not seen by the tweeter, which has its own amplifier. The clipping of the woofer amplifier may not even be noticed in this case. It would surely be heard with a passive crossover, where it might even overheat and damage the tweeter, because of the large amount of high frequency energy in the clipped signal.

Crossover filters for a speaker usually incorporate frequency response corrections for the individual drivers to obtain a desired overall response. The active network has the advantage of correcting easily for different sensitivities of drivers and equalizing not only the individual drivers but the combined response as well. Not having to deal with the interaction between driver impedance and passive filter network gives the designer of an active crossover/equalizer much greater freedom and control to develop a superior product.

@carlsbad2 wrote:

"headroom" is also a marketing term.

It absolutely is not, on the contrary it barely even registers as a factor in audiophilia - if it even could, pragmatically speaking. Tom Danley on headroom:

In audio, there is an expression headroom is your friend and I guess that is part of the message. What loudspeakers do wrong or non-linearly changes with level and the amount of misbehavior increases more rapidly than the level of the desired signal as you increase the operating level.

Well before a speaker burns out, it is severely compromised in it's performance.

With the heating of the voice coil, one finds the SPL decreases relative to the expected level with increasing power, also the systems tuning / frequency response changes at the same time, for the same reason.

For modern drivers, this power compression begins about 1/8 of the drivers rated power, if rated using the AES procedure.

Honestly there is so much BS regarding specs and such in commercial sound that to add a sense of realism or something to that mess, we have a 3rd party laboratory specify usable rated power. Hifi, don't get me started.

Great sound can be had with low and high wattage amps. Variables in implementation with speaking coupling, sensitivity, type of configuration, personal taste and requirements, individual benchmarks, etc. makes it come together for one or the other. 

@esarhaddon1 +2

@phusis +1

Mike