Is there such a thing as too much power?

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.

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.

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.
 

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.

Why is everyone assuming that the make, quality and characteristics of an amplifier are changing when going to higher power ? The question asked, did not imply that.

Given everything else being equal, there is no argument except maybe just the cost and power consumption, that going to a higher power is always better.

So, what that means is, if you have amplifier model line A, with characteristics X, if you move to a higher power amplifier with EXACTLY the same characteristics, there is NO negative. It still is amplifier with model line A, with exactly the same characteristics X, just higher power. There is not one argument here which can defend that lower power is better in this case.

Think Pass labs for example, like upgrading from an XS150 to an XS300. In this case, in fact the quality is most likely even BETTER since the latter comes with a beefier power supply.

In the case of the Porsche examples people have indicated above, that would be akin to getting the same car, still a Porsche but now with a 400 hp engine than a 180 hp engine.  I admit my first example of having a 500hp car did not emphasize that point.

Do not equate going to a higher power, with also changing the quality. The two have nothing to do with each other.