How important is S/N Ratio....?

Wavetrader - if you do this yourself be sure you know what you're doing. Installing low ESR caps with certain voltage regulators might cause oscillation.

Kijanki.....thanks for the warning.....I am lucky as I have one of the best techs in the country 10 minutes away.

Kijanki.....Let me clear that up....my tech Fred does all this work for me.....We have been friends since 1975. Fred has been doing this professionally for 40 years.

I found it interesting at RMAF that Roger Sanders insisted that more power was better. He was biamping his electrostatic speakers with 600 (top) and 1000 (bottom) watt amps. His reasoning had to do with headroom that would improve dynamics.

Not sure I agree fully, but thought I'd mention it in light of the comments here.

http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/Multimedia/node271.html

This article claims 96db range....from dead quiet to loudest.
other articles claim up to 120db. 'Pain Threshold' is usually quoted at about 135db. I don't know what OSHA says, but I'll go out on a limb here and say that an accurately reproduced Jet takeoff at 120db will, if repeated monthly, take the edge off your HF hearing within a year or less.
At that PEAK level, the sound of a car door slamming or a gunshot would be enough to hear next door.
At this point, 'ya gotta wonder if your speakers are up to it! A 120db slam is pretty ambitious and even if your speakers CAN do that (What kinds CAN do that?) I rather suspect you would need your own substation to power the multiple kilowatts of amp necessary to keep up.
I haven't done the math, but you'd need speaker of fairly high sensitivity and power handling capacity with huge dynamic limits.
I tend to agree with those saying damping factor is not that important after a certain minimal value, but that bein said, nobody has mentioned the other half of the equation, that being speaker 'Q'. A critically damped speaker (Q=.707) coupled with a reasonable damping factor may actually produce thin bass.....Is this the opposite of what the fans of 'bloom' hint at? I'm not clear on that point.

Anyway, good luck, all you fans of accurate jet take offs and I'll be sure to buy stock in a hearing aid company. soon.