Why do speakers improve with more powerful amps?

@mlsstl 

Attempting to impress others or change their minds results in meaningless debate and frustration, both a waste of your time.

This should be emblazoned at the top of every thread!

@mapman Wrote:

In any case it’s always better to have more power than needed than less. That’s called headroom and is a real engineering concept and not just marketing. You can look it up!

I agree! See articles Below:

Mike

https://www.cieri.net/Documenti/JBL/Technical%20Notes/JBL%20Technical%20Note%20-%20Danger,%20Low%20Power.pdf

http://diyaudioprojects.com/Technical/Papers/Damping-Damping-Factor-and-Damn-Nonsense-Floyd-Toole.pdf

+2 @akg_ca

Roger from Rogers High Fidelity had an interesting comment somewhere about amps operating in their "sweet spot" of sort of a median power delivery, and noted as an example that very powerful amps into efficient speakers don’t get the amp into its best tone zone. Not his exact words but I get it.

@wolf_garcia I get it as well. I recently upgraded my tube integrated to a much more powerful Rogers EHF-200 MKII to power my Harbeth’s - what an idiot I am for buying such inefficient speakers:)

I now have the luxury of virtually unlimited headroom (yes, that marketing term again) and it definitely hits its sweet spot - but that is no where near its max rated output.

It’s apparent when one reads threads like this that everyone has an opinion but only some have science and facts to actually backup their opinions.

That’s just the way it is but my only suggestion would be everyone is always best served by at least valuing the science and principles that account for how things actually work and doing the best they can to apply common learnings in their case as best they can. That’s the happy path to success. Anything otherwise is a detour at best and a dead end road in the worst case.

@hilde45 Great points!  I appreciate that.  Had not thought about that side of the topic.I'm pretty much a 'noob' with regards to the technical side of this.  Have learned a lot from this forum though over the last couple years.  I read a lot but don't post much.  Thanks!