The AVERAGE watts even on inefficient speakers playing loud is only in the low single digits. Even an avreage twenty watts would either drive you out of the room or else make youd deaf. Power is used for very, very short term transients which can be 20 to 30 dB(20 Db is a multiplier of 100). These transients are very short and good amps recover from the overload very quickly. But even good amps clip these transients and weaken the fidelity. If you want the best sound as my old friend George Bischoff(Melos amps, 200 and 400 watts triode) said - a good big un will beat a good little un every time.
30 to 50 watts seems to be all I desire
Weird, but in my small listening room (12x16) no matter the speakers used, to a T they all can be driven quite superbly with amps in the 30 to 50 watt range. This includes the Maggie 1.7.
I had a few 200 watt amps in rotation but took them out for now because I never got past about 8:00 or at most 9:00 on the preamp, and oftentimes it was around the 7:30 mark.
So I personally don’t buy into the lower efficiency speakers needing gobs of power to sound good. Caveat: Listening to mainly Jazz at volumes less than 85db, normally.
Cheers, all.
- ...
- 31 posts total
- 31 posts total