Amplifier power versus maximum speaker input power

Markpao,

Your problem with the amount of travel on your volume control is related to the gain of your amp, not its power.

The importance of accounting for the amount of gain in systems is sadly often overlooked (damping factor is another aspect of amp-speaker matching that I wish I'd known about earlier on).

Input sensitivity is something that I find myself having a harder time getting my head around than gain in dB. And I am not clear on if input sensitivity can give an idea of the amount of gain in dB (and what other specs might be needed to calculate dB gain from input sensitivity).

Am I understanding input sensitivity correctly, as follows?: The higher the input sensitivity (say 2V to reach full power, as opposed to 1V to reach full power), the more travel I will have in my preamp volume control. So someone without sufficient fine tuning in volume control or who wants to move out of the 8-10 range and more into the 10-1 o'clock range should try to find an amp with higher input sensitivity.

Do I have this right?

Wow Al,

As usual an excellent response. Thank you very much for all of the incredible guidance that you offer here.

Just ran the formulas on my recently acquired Butler 2250, which is 250W into 8 ohms. With 2V input sensitivity. Voila! Gain is 27 dB (approximately, for the reasons Al gave).