My
amp is a rebuilt and upgraded Quad 405 driving 4 ohm speakers. Can't
go past 40% volume without being way too loud. I do have a small
listening room though.
Unfortunately this is really more of a historical issue. Lets define a word: gain.
Gain is the amount that a device increases the output based on the input. It's really just a muliple, but we talk about it in decibels (dB), and is calculated using this formula:
20 x log( Vout/Vin )
The point though is that the critical parts are the Voltage out / Voltage in.
For historical reasons, preamps tend to have way too much gain. This was so you could turn up the volume on really low volume sources. This is why we generally can't turn the volume up past 10 O'clock except perhaps with a legacy system like an AM radio with a very faint signal.
Amps also have voltage gain, and I believe by convention it's 23 dB.
A preamp output rated as the absolute maximum output voltage. Sometimes this is quite high, up to 15-20V.
Amplifiers may be rated as either V needed to a certain output, or V needed to reach maximum.
But keep in mind that all of this is multiplication of the input, not a fixed value. :)
