Actually most amps and speakers are up to the task of playing at moderate to high volumes without the distortion driving you out of the room, but the plain fact is that other things, some things that go bump in the night, produce the distortion. Unfortunately, speakers and amps get a lot of the the blame. The distortion I'm referring to, the distortion you hear when the volume is turned up, is at least an order of magnitude higher than a modestly priced amp's total harmonic distortion.
