More power for better sound at low volumes?

"I do note in my travels that in the US there is a tendency to overdampen rooms, and suspect that if a listening room is overdamped, details get lost at lower listening levels."

I would agree.

My wife bought me a very nice plush recliner for my listening room for Father's Day. I think I am noticing this effect to some extent now as a result of the additional damping in the room due to the added presence of the recliner when listening in it. On the sofa about 5 feet closer to the speakers, no problem still.

In my mind the 'overdamping' issue just serves to demonstrate that our systems (most anyway) are best served by being heard in rooms which add information (from reflections) which are not in the source. No one listens to music in an anechoic chamber but it might be interesting to hear in other than a nearfield set up what all of the subtle detail sounds like without interference from all of the reflections which would mask them, especially the higher frequencies. Just a thought.........

Maybe we like all of the reflections because our basic systems are just not up to the task and they mask a lot of crap?

"No one listens to music in an anechoic chamber but it might be interesting to hear in other than a nearfield set up what all of the subtle detail sounds like without interference from all of the reflections which would mask them, especially the higher frequencies. Just a thought........."

One word: "Headphones".

The down side of course is that most of the spatial cues in the (stereo)recording involving acoustic instruments will not be reproduced in three dimensions correctly with headphones so that is a form of distortion that is inherent with headphones that can mask detail in a different way. For mono recordings, headphones may be golden in terms of detail delivery.

THe fact is that the sound of most music is a 3 (actually 4 including time) dimensional phenomenon that requires three dimensions and room acoustics to reproduce accurately without distortion.

The best panacea I know of for listening to detail is nearfield listening with a pair of good omni-directional speakers set up well for that application.

Not really Mapman, with earphones you loose the open soundstage effect of a well set up system which I value as I know you do as well. Although not stated I recognize that there are speaker designs which depend on reflections for their imaging characteristics (need I tell you? :-)Other than that I find the headphones (mine anyway) very rewarding. I bought 2 sets (headphones and tubed amps) for my main system and, where they really shine, in the TV system where soundstaging is not a big deal.

Newbee, you are right of course.

Check my last post again. I had edited and expanded it to cover that exact caveat.