Is there such a thing as too much power?

I learned my lesson long time ago, there is absolutely no substitute for having the headroom needed when you need it!

when you push the volume at times, you will need the power and headroom as to not send distortion to speakers, from overdriving a low watt amplifier into distortion.

been through more warranty situations anyone should go through, from lower watt amps.
When I hit my first high powered amp, no more blown tweeters/mids/woofers.

I don’t have the Telarc 1812 Overture, but I would expect it to be exceedingly rare for any recording of music to have a wider dynamic range than Stravinsky’s "Firebird Suite" on Telarc (Robert Shaw conducting the Atlanta Symphony) and Prokofiev’s "Romeo and Juliet" on Sheffield Lab (Erich Leinsdorf conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic).

I have observed the waveforms of those recordings on a computer, using a professional audio editing program, and found them to have a dynamic range (the difference in volume between the loudest notes and softest notes) of about 55 db, which is simply incredible. Correspondingly, at my 12 foot listening distance the softest notes are reproduced at SPL’s of about 50 db, and the loudest notes at about 105 db. My little Pass XA25, which after leaving class A can probably provide around 100 watts into the 6 ohm impedance of my speakers, has no trouble at all accomplishing that with zero evident distortion.  And likewise in the case of the 70 watt VAC Renaissance 70/70 MkIII I used previously.

My speakers are rated at 97.5 db/2.83 volts/1 meter/6 ohms. As with many such specs that rating might be a bit optimistic.

Regards,
-- Al

I found that interesting since I had read the output current of other brands of amplifiers. Not sure what to make of the lack of response.

Amplifier current ratings are among the most useless and misleading of specs, IMO. What they usually represent is how much current can be provided into a dead short (zero ohms) for some unspecified miniscule fraction of a second. And in some or many cases they represent what the amp’s power supply can provide for that miniscule fraction of a second, rather than what the amp’s outputs can provide.

See this thread: https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/current-limit-onset-definition?sort_order=asc

Regards,
-- Al

The 6B4G is a 2A3 with a different base.

A minor point, but for the record it's probably worth noting that the 6B4G is a 6A3 with a different base.  Both of those tubes, in turn, are electrically similar to the 2A3 except for their filament voltages and currents, which are very different (6.3 volts/1 amp in the case of the 6B4G and 6A3; 2.5 volts/2.5 amps in the case of the 2A3).

Regards,
-- Al

+1 @larryi & @three_easy_payments

I would add a couple of things:

1) Within a given class of operation (A, AB, D), and if everything else is equal, more amplifier power tends to mean greater cost. So for a given investment in an amplifier choosing a lower powered design tends to mean that a greater percentage of that investment can go toward quality rather than toward watts.

2) Some excerpts from posts by Atmasphere in this thread (the rest of his posts in that thread are also well worth reading):

Its important with any system to avoid distortion but in fact distortion is the name of the game as the human ear translates distortion into tonality....

... A lot of push-pull amplifiers will actually make more distortion below a certain power level, so for those amplifiers its helpful to have a speaker that is a little less efficient, so the distortion is happening at a lower level and is hopefully less noticeable. But this is why some amps seem to lack detail at lower power levels.

There is definitely more to this than meets the eye!

... There is something to the idea that smaller amps sound better. In the case of push-pull tube amps, this has almost entirely to do with the output transformer itself. The reason for this is that the more power the output transformer can handle, the less bandwidth it has. So in the larger designs, usually the designer has made a tradeoff based entirely on what he thinks is important....

... Now the problem with push-pull is often that there is a phase-splitter circuit that introduces some distortion. This is not true of all P-P amps, but it is true of most of them. This generally is not an issue until you get into the lower power regions of the amplifier, at which point the distortion of the phase splitter comes into play. For this reason a highly efficient speaker (+98 db or so) may not be the best choice with a plus-100 watt amplifier as you may never get the amp out of that region of higher distortion at lower power levels.

Regards,
-- Al