What is your experience with amp power?

To be honest, there are a lot of inaccurate statements in this thread. I am guessing that only a few people here know design and have experience in building an audio component.

Are there really inaccurate/false statement in this thread, or is it just perspectives and experiences that don’t match with yours? If it’s truly a false statement, it can be decisively refuted with math & physics.

One of the common perspectives I disagree with is (paraphrasing) - "doubling power is only 3dB and that’s not much anyways". 3dB is a lot! You can TOTALLY hear a huge difference in 3dB. Find your "preferred" listening volume, then adjust up or down by 3dB - it sucks! 1dB was loosely determined as the "audibility threshold" a long time ago, but the subtext there is *for casual listeners*. It’s more meaningful for a seasoned audiophile. When dealing with say L/R channel imbalances, you can certainly notice down to a third of a decibel, at least.

Another perspective I don’t share is that paralleling multiple outputs (tubes, transistors) imposes some kind of sonic penalty. Definitely NOT in my experience. If anything, the aberrant characteristics of one particular device can get averaged/smoothed out by the others (that’s good). The choice of device itself matters a lot (of course), but if the PSU and OPT and driver circuitry can handle it then the more the merrier I say. Bridging is a different story, as is stacking extra gain stages - both of these can certainly impose performance penalties in the pursuit of higher power and higher volumes.

I definitely get folks who prefer the sonic character of say 6L6 or EL34 (I love both of those tubes) over the more austere KT88/KT120, but I bet a properly done high power amp with lots of paralleled (say) 6L6GC would be pretty amazing - you just don’t see those on the market. Manley does have their NeoClassic with lots of EL34, but I haven’t heard it yet - looks interesting.

I agree that 3 db is quite a bit of difference in sound level and I share your experience with channel balance.  I use to run a Levinson No.32 linestage that allows for 0.1 db changes in volume.  That gradation seemed ridiculously fine.  With most musical sources (i.e., not a steady test signal) it is a bit hard to hear a 1 db change in volume.  But, in terms of channel balance, it was quite easy to hear a 0.2 db change to one channel.  That explains why Levinson offered such small changes.  I don't like stepped attenuators which have so few steps that there is more than a 1 db change between steps--the right volume level always seems to be between the two offered steps.  It is amazing how small is the window on the ideal volume level.  That is another reason why remote control of volume seems essential to me--you cannot, practicably speaking, find the right volume by getting up to manually adjust the volume even if you are not lazy.

bigkidz is correct.

Do not concern yourself with amount of amplifier power, concern yourself with quality of amplifier power.

I bought my amp from a custom builder who also built my preamplifier.  They are "matched" in a way because the amp has input transformers that demand, for optimum performance, being matched to a line stage or preamplifier with a corresponding output transformer.  I had this combination for about five years or so, and in that time, I would sometime be asked how much power the amp put out and I had no idea whatsoever.  When the builder, who is from Italy, came over to the states, I got to talking to him and I asked him about the output power of my amp.  I got such a look of disdain from him; clearly I did not deserve that amp if I concerned myself with such irrelevant and trivial matters.  He thought about it a bit himself and took a guess (I would not expect him to have actually measured it, how it sounds is the only consideration); he guess 5.5 wpc, which is my answer to anyone who asks.

for those worrying about the clear-as-mud, here's a simple solution:

the Marantz 40N amp is simple, has real knobs, and has 75 wpc rated and is enough for almost any reasonable home