What is your experience with amp power?

It also depends what are you looking for, and how your hearing is.

For most of us going for higher power is a no-brainer, as most of us have no hearing above 14kHz or so.

However, in case your hearing is still intact, and you are (un)fortunate to hear out to 20kHz, then there's a hard stop. I did this test yesterday - two amps going into a 89dB/Wm true 8R load full range speaker, no crossover, extremely revealing in the high frequencies up to 23kHz. So, easy and direct load and no interference from crossover. I used two amps to drive the speakers.

Amp 1 - 0.6WPC Darling amplifier (SET vacuum tube).

Amp 2 - CJ Premier SA350 Legendary 350WPC solid state power monster. (Which is one of the least fatiguing high power amps you can find.)

To my huge surprise I could not listen to the CJ any louder than I did with the flea-power tube amp! Why? Because yes, it could play MUCH louder, YET the level where it played WITHOUT NOTICEABLE FATIGUE was actually below the level the 0.6W Darling played.

If your hearing is compromised in the HF region, you can push your powerhorse quite a bit more before you notice ANY signs of fatigue. You might be able to use all of it....

Good luck! ;

Power is good and watts are watts, no such thing as better watts. But speakers are not resistors; they are reactive and good amp design(often great power supplies which don't show up in specs but do in sound) does matter when feeding real life loads. How an amp responds to reactance matters. Some amps ring a little bit into bad loads and take time to recover. Some amps can't produce power into bad loads only resistors. I recall a revered 80 watt tube amp that only put out 2 watts at 20 kHz into real loads. And the story can go on and on. The best is to have a quality amp that works into reactance AND lots of power. You'd be amazed how much power may be needed for split seconds(30 or more dB) to make clean dynamic transients even though the average power being used is only watts.

Most tube amps soft clip. Most SS amps hard clip. Many newer Class D amps also soft clip. Soft clipping gives the illusion of going louder overall (like “loudness wars”)  but the dynamic peaks are suppressed.

Clipping is public enemy #1 of good sound. Soft clipping is sonically more acceptable to most than hard clipping. More power when needed is the antidote to clipping. Them’s just the facts…..

The "quality of the music" depends on the "quality" of the amp.AND the power. Sometimes mutually exclusive.

It seems the closest thing to a perfect world of amp employment is

via Bi-Amping. That said I use an Integrated.