Whats with the Watts ??

One could easily devote months, even years to figuring out the power game (it's marketing). I suggest:
1. stay away from exotic products that you, personally, have not lived with.
2. start with a popular amplifier (and speaker for that matter) that one can easily resell.
3. the most popular size of solid state amps have about 100-125 watts and will drive most speakers well.
4. Few of us get it exactly right the first time, so expect to trade within a year.
5. All systems are flawed, but we can put together stuff that we enjoy, and that's the point.

I would like to thank everyone for taking the time to provide me direction and advice. Every comment has been more valuable than you know. I listened to three speakers yesterday that I really enjoyed – Dali Mentor 5 (88db), Totem Forrest (87db), and Magnepan 3.6 (85db). The dealers did not have any other Dali or Totem models and I would have liked to give them a listen. These two sounded “similar” to me. When I first listened to the Magnepans, I was “wowed”. The music separation was incredible. But, poor recordings sounded poor and they seemed to prefer certain music genres over others. They were played through an AR SD135 amp and AR SP17 preamp. But, they sounded much better with the AR HD220 amp, but that is really pushing my budget… Anyway, back to the wattage theme of my thread…. It seemed as though I needed to increase the volume on the Magnepans to get the best out of them. I’m a quick learner, and what I’ve learned here is that these speakers are not very efficient and more wattage is needed to drive them. However, does that also mean that I need to listen at louder volumes?

Silver911, you will find that the Forests have a tremendous sense of aliveness at low volume levels. I used a Krell400xi and they LOVED IT!! Remember, room size is a factor and current from the amp.

Planers (I own electrostatics) are exotic products and each type of planer needs special consideration. Maggies are inefficient and also must be played louder than electrostatics to satisfy most listeners, but electrostatics have volume limitations and present a capacitive load which makes them incompatible with many otherwise excellent amplifiers. Either stay away from planers or be prepared to mould you entire system to their needs.

In my experience as long as you have plenty of reserve power, the amp will control the speaker even at low volumes. One of the best systems I've ever heard was Magnepans driven by the cj premier 8's and the older cj art pre which was thier flagship for years, not sure if it still is. At low to medium volumes it was like magic and it sounded so good you didn't even want to turn it up. Go with the speaker you like but match it with power. in this type of equipment they will reveal bad recordings, that is normal. Get the best source components you can a really good cdp will help, I don't know if mine is really good but it brought almost all the cd's back to a point where I could listen again and they sounded good. On my old cdp there was just a handful I would listen to as the rest sounded bad to me.

Good luck
beerdraft