Why do speakers improve with more powerful amps?

@Phusis

This shows how easily it is to ignore the Facts of the subject and keep on trying to reinforce the idea that clipping is the ONLY place that headroom affects. Clipping is only a minor concern is is the LEAST of the actual AUDIPOPHILE reasons for having overhead.
Yes you can power a pair of headphones with a couple of well designed watts of power but you won’t be powering a set of Maggie’s with only that. You are mixing apples with oranges IF you think there is not a high level of sound quality in reference here. Or as I said before would you expect audiophiles totally ignore ALL of the statistics published about the Amps they are discussing or buying.
IF you take a lower powered Amp, say 10 watts, running at .5% distortion and run it at 5 watts what is your distortion level compared to a high powered Amp, say 100 Watts and run it at 5 watts output, with .5%. That is not .5% at 5 watts but IS .5% at the capacity of the amp, or at a designated % of output. With a higher wattage capacity you can run the distortion right down to the floor. That is just one of the factors to consider.

Possibly if I make a comparison to mechanical engineering. A simple street car capable of 150 HP putting out 100 HP is going to be under far more stress and pushing harder on every last component in it than a muscle car capable of 500HP putting our 100HP. The muscle cars is barely idling and not under ANY stress.

@carlsbad2 

”You listen to the first watt.  If it sucks, you don't need 299 more of them.”

this could have broad implications.  I’m going to file this in my “ life lessons “ folder.

thanks for the post.

Both higher wattage and lower wattage with respective lower and higher sensitivity speaker combinations each render unique sonic results. Just as both tube and solid state (or then combination thereof) extend that further.

Maybe a closer focus and discussion over quality power supplies and current delivery would be more relevant than this endless sensitivity argument.

"So why the hell do people buy inefficient speakers?"

Speaking only for myself, I buy speakers that:

A - fit the space I have for them; and

B - sound good to me

In my case (home office/desktop audio), the speakers that fit the space and sound best always turn out to be sealed/acoustic suspension 2-ways. As it happens, that type of speaker design really does tend to sound better with more powerful amps, mainly because so much power is required to move the woofers harder and harder w/increasing volume as the frequencies drop to neas the speaker’s resonant frequency (bass reflex designs operate more permissively near their limits).

But having said that, it’s probably not true that an amp twice as powerful as the one that can happily drive a given pair of sealed speakers, would necessarily sound better. More like the amp that can happily drive sealed speakers to fairly loud volumes has to be more powerful than one that would happily drive bass reflex speaker to fairly loud volumes.