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Is there such a thing as too much power?

   I downgraded power from 300 watts per ch to 70 and I like the sound better! I always thought more power is a good thing, but could that be wrong?

Please enlighten me...
gongli3
cakyol's avatar
cakyol
940 posts
 
I dont still understand the arguments against LOL....

ALL OTHER THINGS BEING EQUAL (That is the part people seem to be missing) a higher power amplifier will always be preferable.  It will run less stressed and have much more headroom.

As for the higher distortion at lower levels of a power amp, even those higher levels of distortion is still well BELOW anyone's hearing so it is a moot point.

pragmasi
212 posts
 
This thread is worth a read (you can get the gist from the first two posts). By following the instructions you can work out how much power you need. If you look at the poll results you can see that  >70%  indicated 25W or less with nearly 40% needing only 4W.
Power in itself is not a bad thing but assuming you are working to some kind of a budget then it would be best to find the highest quality amplifier that meets your needs within your budget. Power adds significantly to the production cost of a product (less so with class D) because some of the most expensive components within a power amp are the power supply and heatsinks the size of which are proportionately related to the rated output power.
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon
12,531 posts
 
A lot of the stuff people believe about power makes an awful lot of sense. The only problem is that while the reasons make sense on paper they don't work out nearly so well in the real world. 

Point of order: one low-powered amp that sounds better than one high powered amp is by simple logic proof that power isn't everything. We have not one but hundreds of low powered amps that sound hugely better than thousands of much higher powered amps. So clearly something else is going on. 

What I think is going on, power is but one small item on a very long list of things that matter. In fact its kind of weak and pointless to qualify that. Its what I know is in fact going on. The list of things that affect sound is so much greater and longer than we know that it often strikes me as pointless to even be talking about them. 

I mean to talk about how many watts an amplifier puts out, in terms of sound quality, we might as well be talking about how many grains of sand in judging the beach at Cancun. Which would be a pretty nice beach... anywhere else but Cancun.


alexberger
940 posts
 
Hi @larryi ,

I'm not against to use, for example, small monitor speakers with sensitivity ~88-90dB/1W in 100-150 sq ft room. But in this combination even 300B SET will be enough.

I think the very popular but wrong way to do - using big low sensitivity  (< 88dB/1W)  big tower speakers in a big room.
In this situation need a huge amplification power and a result a strong and ugly compression.
 
big_greg
6,717 posts
 
My main system cast offs often end up in one of my other systems.  For a while I had my 440 watt per channel Wyred 4 Sound ST-1000 MKII in my bedroom with my 102 dB efficient Klipsch KLF-30 speakers.  I'm pretty sure that was too much power.  For that room and for what the system was intended for (mostly listening at quiet volumes before bed/sleep).

If not for the different gain settings on my ARC LS 26, the music would often have been louder than I wanted it, even at the lowest volume setting.  The KLF-30's have found a new home and now I have some much less efficient (and much smaller) Canton monitors in there.

The ST-1000 MKII was in my main system for a while and was replaced by Rogue Audio M-180 monoblocks that are "only" 180 WPC.  Great improvement in sound quality (not that the W4S amp was bad), and more than enough power.

There's a 30 WPC that I've been eyeing the last couple of days.  30 Class A watts.  I'm going to Pass on that one (see what I did there?), but watts are just one factor to take into consideration when it comes to amplification.
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