How many watts??

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.....

Hello,
I can play my system at a little over 2% of the total volume and hear the dynamic range and stereo imaging on my system. One cheat to this is add a nice subwoofer or two. I like JLAudio or REL. I also have a JLAudio CR1 crossover so I can pick the crossover point of my front speakers to then hand off to the two subs. Some speakers have this crossover technology built in them like the new PSB T600 Synchrony speaker. I believe it has 5 crossover to produce a very good sound. Plus they play from 24 hz to 23khz. Paul Barton hit a home run on this line. The B600 bookshelf speakers are on another level too. At around $3k with stands these set the bar very high. Last but not least. You need to get rid of all that junk in your sound. Do you know there is a little more music in that album you
probably are not hearing. If you would like to hear what you are missing demo a Puritan PSM156 or PSM136 power conditioner that comes with a really nice dissipative power cord unlike some other brands. If you have not heard Puritan has the Ground Master City that lets you take this plug and play system to another level. I am talking pitch black background. Sometimes I get up to flip the record before it’s over because the space between the tracks is so quiet. They are sold across the country. This is the store in the Chicagoland area that lets you demo in your home. https://holmaudio.com/
Basically, No buyers remorse….nice!

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.

That's interesting. Because I heard a system one time so bad it gave me a headache. Literally had a headache driving home afterwards. It only sounded good when turned down to where you could hardly hear it. Okay frankly did not sound good even then. Turned off, then at least the room sounded pretty good. So I guess by your standard this was a really good system?