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Amp's nominal power rating - any use?

I just paired a couple of Coincident Frankentein monos with my SF Guarneri Homage. The sound is great (fat, rich, dynamic, transparent) and sounds well with any type of music (opera, rock, electronic...). These are 8W monoblocks and sound like with more power or at least the same as my previous fabulous pass aleph 3 (30W class A SS). Of course it depends if tubes not tubes, class A or not, speaker sensitivity, impedance load, room dimensions etc, but what i see is that it's not a relevant criteria at all on its own. Maybe there should be some transformation formula to take into account some of these factors to get some Apparent or Perceived Power, but maybe it would be hard to take into account all factors. Any ideas, opinions, on this?
dongiovanni
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,477 posts
 
Irvrobinson - let me explain. Average music power delivered to speakers is very low - just a few percent of peak power. It is because music on average doesn't go more than half of the loudness and that means 1/10 of the power. In addition music has gaps. Amplifier's max continuous rms power is completely irrelevant. What is important is peak power that amp can deliver.

Imagine two amps:

1. 10W rms, 100W peak
2. 100W rms, 100W peak

In my opinion they will have exactly the same max loudness with music signal.
hifihvn
943 posts
 
Dynamic headroom?
magfan
1,583 posts
 
Amps are rated into resistive loads which says next to nothing about how they do into a reactive real world speaker.

I would propose that amps be rated into 8 and 4 ohm resistors....
Than at the same 2 impedances into +-45 degree reactive loads.

The resultant chart would be a very visual indicator of how the amp does into real loads.

That's the way .....at least on paper to see what an amp can be expected to do.
charles1dad's avatar
charles1dad
10,250 posts
 
Magfan,
Your suggestion for measuring speaker output is very much spot on, I wish this would become an industry standard procedure. The current method is of so little real world value in trying to determine an amp`s potential match with a given speaker.
dongiovanni OP
10 posts
 
Irvrobinson, no, i never tried the SF with higher power amps. Maybe i should now for curiosity, since due to planning the roll-over to a tube amp, not long ago i got a aprox 100w onkyo receiver for home cinema (with some mordaunt-short speakers) so i have separate systems now for music /movies. I watch cinema a lot and wasn't imagining tiring those delicate 300B with movies...
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