Hello phays245. Amplifier power is a bit odd and confusing for beginners. Don't feel bad. In the world of money, doubling sound quite serious. I used to be able to take my wife to lunch for $20. Lately it seems more like $40! Ouch! Sadly, amplifier power is not like that. We hear on a logrithmic scale. You can hear a mosquito across the room on a quiet night, yet stand near Niagra Falls (or an airport runway) and not die, even though our clothes are flapping and the ground is shaking. Any speaker will play 3db louder when the power applied to it doubles. But 3db is about the smallest change an untrained ear can notice. That means when the drums go "BOOM" you need a whole lot of power in a hurry. If you watch the Vu meters on a tape deck or amp while the music is playing, you'll notice that a 10 db momentary boost is clearly noticible but not impressive. Yet a 10 db loudness increase call for 10X tha power the amp was putting out before that louder sound came along. A 20 db increase calls for 10 times 10 (that's 100!) more power. If the amp was cruising along at one watt, it suddenly needs to put out 100 watts to accurately reproduce that 20db louder sound. And just for the fun of it, a 30db increase would ask the amp for 1000 (yes, one thousand) watts of power. A 10 watt amp can happily cruise along at two watts until it is suddenly asked to produce a 20 db louder drumbeat. Two hundred watts? No hope for clean sound. This is where speqker effeciency becomes importent. If a very sensitive speaker can play sufficiently loud at one tenth of a watt (100 milliwatts) and that 20db peak comes along - 10 watts is no problem. But a 30db peak (requiring 100 watts) is not going to be reproduced well. So you see that a !00 watt amp is no big deal, especially when driving an ineffecient speker. And a 400 watt amp only plays 6bd louder than the 100 watt amp, which isn;t much at all. There are serious amps being made and sold that only procuce 3 watts per channel. You can realize why the owners of such an amp need very efficient speakers! A speaker rated with a sensitivity of 80db/whatever needs 100 times the power to procduce the same sound lavel as a 100db/whatever rated speaker. Yikes! Now you know why there is such a wide range of serious products for the music lover to choose frrom. Enjoy the music!
Need help matching speakers with amplifer
I have a pair of Boston Acoustic Vr-20 floorstanding speakers. Im not sure what the RMS continous power rating of these speakers are in order to make the best match with an amplifier. In Hi-Fi Engine the spec’s just say recommended Amplifier 15-200 watts at 8ohms. is this saying the continous is 15 and the peak is 200. I would think the continous would have to be more than 15 watts being these are larger floor standing speakers. Thanks for help from the community!!