How many watts??

Watts are only one small part of the overall equation of how much power an amp has. Too many people get hung up on watts and db’s. Yes numbers can be a good starting point but never stop there. Example 1 watt from a class A amp is nowhere close to 1 watt from a class D amp. Its like comparing the horse power of a lawn mower to a motor cycle. The number can be the same on paper but the end product is nothin alike.

Its like comparing the horse power of a lawn mower to a motor cycle. The number can be the same on paper but the end product is nothin alike.

Yeah… I agree that my John Dear mower is nothing like a Kawasaki motorcycle. They are both green, and have engines, but after that…

James Watt, who coincidentally standardised the unit of Horse Power, later the “metric horse” became labeled as being Watts and kilowatts…
So to claim that a watt is not a watt, only means something in the context of asking a two different 1W amplifiers to give 2 watts… and how they clip.

I quest that the OP likes it quiet. The average person needs the 50W amp that the manufacturer recommends. And there is another Gaussian tail of people on the right, that will blow the speaker apart. We can call these the 65dB, 85dB and 105 dB groups… or the A, B and D groups.

Your brain interprets distortion as volume. It can be any distortion coming from the system or the room. You have work to do.

@russ69 , Hold on Tex, you are forgetting about Crown and Phase Linear. They were the first to make amps over 100 watts. The Crown sounded like finger nails down a chalk board. The Phase Linear like to blow up if you tried to drive the wrong speaker with it. The semiconductors of the day could not handle the heat and the Phase had pathetic heat sinks. But, it sounded 1/2 way decent and it did not clip into large Advents at 100 dB or so. Both amps had these large fancy face plates but were only a few inches deep. They may have weighed 5 lb at the most. As compared to the Parasound JC 1 at 65 lb, serious light weights and the JC 1 is a relatively light amp! The big Boulders weigh over 300 lb most of it CNC milled Aluminum of no sonic significance what so ever not to mention fugly to my eye.

Yes I once read an op Ed from a audiophile who stated that the sign of a good system was to see how low you could play the volume and still have it sound good.
 Not the other way around.

I own a set of Dahlquist DQ10s....a notoriously hard to drive speaker.  Before I bought them, did some research.  Everyone kept saying, "you need at LEAST 200 watts to drive them".  I had no desire to purchase one of those arc welding, heat producing monsters.   Then a technician with 40 years in the field chimed in and told me he's owned 4 sets of the 10s at various times.  Told me the best performing and sounding amp he'd heard them paired with was a Proton D540.....40 watts wpc.  It has a feature called Dynamic Power on Demand. NAD has a version of the same feature called Power Envelope. The Proton has reserve power of 160 wpc.......and that's at 8ohms.  It will drive down to 2ohm loads.  6db of headroom.  I had been listening with a Yamaha at 90 wpc but the Proton f'n blew that Yamaha away.  I'm like you and don't like listening loud. I'm not sure what class amp the Proton is but the 10s sound glorious!  The whole watts thing is b/s.....