It's true, many home listening is at an average 1w with mid-sensitivity speakers in a medium-small room at 70SPL. And listening to level-compressed popular music requires an instantaneous headroom of between 3 and 10dB, which is 2w to 10w max without clipping of peaks. However the headroom of 20dB of acoustic music (orchestral, jazz) and movies peak at 100w. Double or half that peak wattage for speakers that range from +3 to -3dB of typical sensitivity.
Too much power?
I have a wonderful system with a great amplifier, and yet auditioned a more powerful version of the same amp. It indeed seemed to have more punch and drive, but at the expense of playing it a bit too loud. As my current system I rarely play over 70 db, since it’s perfect at low levels. I wonder other than bragging rights, what does more power get you? Since we aren’t here for PA style sound, is there a reasonable limit to how much you will benefit from higher power/ more expensive and? Especially since tire just using one watt most of the time?