Amp play a low volumes?

I think the protection circuitry you may have read is their "soft clipping" feature which may limit it playing loudly if it runs out of power. Your speakers should not require a lot of power. If you plan to play music softly, I would suggest defeating the soft clipping feature. Your amp will probably sound a little better w/o it.

jcd; it's been my experience that it is not the amp that is the limiting factor in making music sound good at low volume, but rather it's the speakers. And I don't think speaker sensitivity has much to do with it either.

For example, My Vandersteen 3As or 3Asigs both sounded very good at low volumes and I enjoyed that, but I recently (5 months ago) acquired Vand. 5s, and the 5s have to be driven at distinctly louder volume to sound good. The 3As and 5s have about the same sensitivity. I have read where reviewers have noted this phenomenon too. I think it has to do with the design of the speaker. As the 5s continue to breakin, they are now sounding better at lower volumes, but still must be played louder to sound good. Good Luck. Craig.

Generally, lower power amps (around 20 watts) sound better than higher powered amps at low volume levels. Most of the time these amps are tubed and sound "alive" at low volume levels unlike solid state amps which tend to go dead. The only exception to this that I know of is the 47 Labs Gaincard, although a pure class A (Pass Labs) may have this characteristic.

Also, as pointed out in the above post, speakers are very important. Electrostatics have excellent low level resolution as do hybrids (ribbon with dynamic cones). Speaker design is also very important, but it seems that bigger speakers do not resolve as well at low volumes as do their smaller driver counterparts. Driver size may have something to do with this.