Help a newbie understand


So the pandemic had me listening to a lot more music and as a consequence, I sold my 30-year-old but still functioning Snell c2 mk4 speakers and Adcom GFA 555 200 watts per channel amp which together sounded great ( to my uneducated and now failing hearing ) playing my digital library of CDs.I wanted to try something different.
I replaced them with Canton reference 9k monitor speakers ( which can handle 200 plus watts and a Technic su g700 integrated amp. max. 70 watts a channel. These also sound great in many different ways. By the way I bought both on Audiogon.

What I miss in the new system is its ability to play loud( I'm old and going hard of hearing) this has led me to play the amp at levels between -10 and 0 per the amps "wide range scale peak power meters"  and at those levels, the needle occasionally spikes into the region slightly above 0  for fractions of a second to a second or two but not ever reaching +6( the next demarcation on the meter) per the integrated amp's meters.

My fear is frying my speaker's voice coil etc. by clipping when I play at the above level so I have two questions. First, is the headroom sufficient to prevent frying my speakers given the listening level and the volume's slight venture into going over 0 on the meter and second how do I read this "wide range scale peak power meter"?
The peak power meter's main demarcations are as follows-50/0001,-40/001,-30/01,-20/.1,-10/10, 0/100,+6/200.and under those numbers is the symbol db/%. 
So I went online but could find nothing that I could understand relative to how to read this type of meter. For example, if the relationship is dB/% what does  -50 represent and the % 0001?, what about 0/100,+6/200?The top numbers make no sense to me -50? -50 what no watts who's on first.
Thank you in advance for your time and expertise.
scott22

Showing 1 response by nekoaudio

The dB and % is telling you how much the incoming signal is being reduced or increased. At 0, whatever is coming in is the same as what's going out (e.g. 1V in -> 1V out). At +6 it is double (e.g. 1V in -> 2V out).

The Technics SU-G700 says its line-level input sensitivity is 200mV, so when getting an input signal of 200mV it is outputting 70W into 8Ω. If your CD player is ~2V, or 2000mV, then -20dB / 0.1% would be 70W output, but if you're using the digital inputs I'm not sure but might guess -20dB is also 70W output when the digital signal has 0dBFS data.

Since the numbers are relative to the input signal, the -50 through +6 range isn't equal to a specific volume. If the input signal is someone barely whispering, you might have to turn it up close to +6dB to hear anything. While if the input signal is a pop song recorded at 0dBFS (i.e. max volume) then you probably need to turn it down to somewhere around -30dB or -40dB for normal listening volumes.

But how loud are you playing? The K9 speakers are listed with a sensitivity of 87dB. That should mean 1W at 1m distance is ~87dB and you can only listen to that for like an hour before risk of hearing damage. At 3m away, you only need like 10W for 87dB. And that's per speaker.

I think even if you have some hearing loss already, listening to loud music to compensate will only cause additional hearing loss and maybe also eventually tinnitus.