The answer is a toughie. I think it comes down to marketing. Despite what a person hears the wattage rating is kind of like horsepower. Lots of speakers are in the 87 to 94 dB 1W/1M class which means they are wasting power as heat rather than transducing it into "sound";ie pressure waves. If that is the case it is easier to "kick" the speaker with watts and produce what many buyers perceive as acceptable loudness. However, the notion of horsepower under the hood also comes into play. Actually to reproduce the transients in musical signals without waveform distortion, compression, etc. would require something on the order of 10,000 Watts. Buyers feel more comfortable with an amp that delivers a couple of hundred watts rather than 50. Enter the concept of marketing. A buyer feels just plain better with more "horsepower" in his amp. And, watts are cheap, but more watts don't necessarily sound better. The original Classe amp produced 20 solid state watts of pure class A performance, sounded very good for a solid state amp, and ran so hot you could have used the heat sinks for waffle irons.
It would be better to have loudspeakers in the range of 98 to 105 dB 1W/1M to take advantage of the simpler circuits in solid state design, vacuum tube amplifiers with only two output tubes in push-pull, or better yet a Single Ended Triode amp that does not require phase splitting of the signal anywhere in the signal path. I think Nelson Pass is doing single ended solid state amps, but haven't kept up with the state of the solid state art. Nelson is, in my opinion, an innovative original thinker. Plus he is a heck of a nice guy. There are lots of tube SET amps that accomplish lovely music reproduction and infuse a kind of life into your recorded music, often quite literally taking your breath away.
It would be better to have loudspeakers in the range of 98 to 105 dB 1W/1M to take advantage of the simpler circuits in solid state design, vacuum tube amplifiers with only two output tubes in push-pull, or better yet a Single Ended Triode amp that does not require phase splitting of the signal anywhere in the signal path. I think Nelson Pass is doing single ended solid state amps, but haven't kept up with the state of the solid state art. Nelson is, in my opinion, an innovative original thinker. Plus he is a heck of a nice guy. There are lots of tube SET amps that accomplish lovely music reproduction and infuse a kind of life into your recorded music, often quite literally taking your breath away.