Building the Audio Note Kit 1 SET amp...

I agree a great amp can only be great if not "breaking a sweat".
My 500 w/ch bel canto amps were acquired mainly for my large ohm f5 speakers in my larger room. I dabbled with various lower power amps for awhile. These are the ones that handle the job effortlessly and the music reflects that. I also run the other smaller less demanding speakers in various rooms concurrently of the same amps. They are overkill perhaps for all the rest but prefer to think of that as my insurance policy. All my speakers get driven to their max. Including the small more tube amp friendly triangles. These always excel at lower to moderate volume and that is the case these days more than ever. I would like to do the tube amp experiment with those someday not that I feel the need but as an experiment. In that I have heard many tube systems including a few sets but never owned one plus I find all the various technologies fascinating...different recipes for a favorite dish in essence. But you can never tell what a pair of speakers are capable of until they are driven effortlessly to their max. The same might be said for an amp as well I suppose if one prefers to look at it that way.

One ironic point in this discussion is power output and its stated benefit . Rebbi had high power Bel Canto amps and wasn't impressed. He says the lower power Manley tube amp was much better. Now the AN 300b has brought him the best overall sound he's ever had in his home. Food for thought, quality trumps quantity sometimes.

Quality is more important but a quality amp alone cannot make any music. Lots of factors contribute to results including personal preferences which are usually what determines quality to that person.

The numbers would seem to indicate that ss must be doing something right. Go figure! 😉

Charles,
Yes, quantity does not equal quality – so much of it is about the interaction between the speaker, the amplifier and the room.
When I first started to get back into audio actively in the mid-2000's, I sold my 1986- era PS Audio Elite + (70 W per channel integrated, all hardwired) and bought a Unison Unico (used) hybrid, integrated amp with a tubed input stage and a transistor output stage. It was actually a beautiful amp. But by that point I had been through several different kinds of speakers and had Ohm Walsh 100's, which do like power. At this point I was heavily into horse trading on Audiogon, and picked up a Bel Canto S300 power amp (Class D) which I paired with a used Manley Shrimp tube preamp, on the theory that the preamp would "warm-up" the sound of the solid-state power amp. By this point I had moved on to a pair of Merlin monitors, the TSM-MMI's. These are voiced with tube amplification, or so the word is on the street, so it was at that point that I sold the class D amp and picked up the Manley Mahi mono-blocks. These sounded much, much nicer with the Merlin speakers then the class DM had.
So yes, I have generally let my speaker choice drive the choice of power, but this time around it may just be different because this new amp is so impressive.