Is there such a thing as too much power?

Stand by- Krell is currently working on the answer. 

Current-ly. Get it?

Admittedly not much of a joke. But then neither is this subject. I mean, the idea anyone still thinks power correlates with quality is mildly entertaining.  But its no joke. Its just funny anyone still thinks that way.

@millercarbon Hey I own a 78 911 SC ! Not the fastest car out there, but like you said well designed to use the power that it has all day long! To the extreme I just sold my 96 911 993 Turbo that was modified 600,hp/595 lb of torque 
That car was amazing! Did I do the stop speed of 200mph......never! Did I race every boy racer out there.......never. But there is nothing like a owning a piece of well engineer equipment that will do everything that you want, and then some at anytime!
I own a Tube amp in triode 35 watts and sounds magical and also own a D class amp that has 550 watts@8ohm 650@4ohms&1,200@2ohms 
When I use the D class to drive my Maggies, they really come alive with soundstage,  inner detail and micro dynamics, even at the lower volume levels. I think I'm a power junkie!!

Not all Watts are equal.  That's why one 50watt amplifier may sound better than another 50watt amp.  We drove a pair of Dahlquist DQ10s with a pair of 80wpc Stax amplifiers to uncomfortable levels that a 300wpc Kenwood could not achieve.  Of course, in 1980s dollars, the Stax was $3000 more then the Kenwood.

I have experience on damaging speakers with Too little watts.  Driving them into distortion and all of a sudden, no tweeters.

The Watt wars has been going on since the intro of solid state and went off the charts with the Japanese solid state invasion in the 80’s. Manufacturers have convinced just about everyone that if you have an 80 watt amp and a 100 watt amp the 100 watt amp is "better" and louder. In general the maximum watt rating of an amp is a worthless number for comparing amps within 2x (or more) the power rating. As someone mentioned dBs use a logarithmic scale so to increase the loudness by 3dBs (not much) you need double the power. So comparing that 80 and 100 watt amp there will be about a 1dB theoretical max increase at full power. You will never hear this!


More important is the design of the power supply and its power reserves. The watt rating is calculated with a constant tone played till it clips. But if a power supply has ample reserves it can deliver many times the wattage rating for short peaks without clipping. For most listening this is more desirable than having an amp with a marginal supply that barely covers its rating. To get a better idea about the real power output and how well it can drive a difficult load check the specs and see if it can double down (or come close) the watts going from a 8 ohm to a 4 ohm load. If it goes to 2 ohms even better. This gives a good approximation of how good the power supply is. I would take a 70 watt amp that doubles down over a 300 watt amp that only has a small increase in watts at a lower ohm load  any day.