wattage


I have seen prior threads on this, but none recently that can answer how many watts from an amp are truly necessary.
Take an inefficient speaker, say 86 w/db. at 98 db (which will harm hearing when sustained) 16 watts would be required. Even doubling this to account for transients would be available at 32 watts. Strickly
from an engineering standpoint, are more than 40 watts really necessary? No audiophile terms like bloom, and slam needed.
Regards.
RJ
tennisdoc40

Showing 1 response by mapman

it always depends.

in this case it depends on how loud you need to go with various recordings and assuming speakers are capable of doing it in your room without strain or compressing.

Generalizations may apply but generalizations seldom yield exceptional performance.

The devil is always in the details.

I have a 60 w/ch integrated running lower efficiency spekaers in a large room and the results are fine up to a point but are limited compared to essentially the same but somewhat larger speakers in another large room running off similar but 500w/ch amps. There is no comparison of overall dynamics and musicality at realistic listening volumes but at typical modest volumes both do similarly fine.