In a way, I like @millercarbon's answer, despite leaving me with the feeling that there really are no good answers. So far, that squares with my experience; any time I think I see a correlation between any particular amp parameter and the quality of sound I hear, along comes another amp that breaks the rule. Having said that, I would still like to find a book that tries to address how power, output current, speaker/crossover characteristics and other factors affect what we hear from a given amp/speaker pairing. Does anyone know if such an animal exists?
Watts and power
Can somebody break it down in layman's terms for me? Why is it that sometimes an amp that has a high watt rating (like, say, a lot of class D amps do) don't seem to always have the balls that much lower rated A or AB amps do? I have heard some people say, "It's not the watts, it's the power supply." Are they talking about big honkin' toroidal transformers? I know opinions vary on a speaker like, say, Magnepans - Maggies love power, right? A lot of people caution against using class D amps to drive them and then will turn around and say that a receiver like the Outlaw RR2160 (rated at 110 watts into 8 ohms) drives Maggies really well! I'm not really asking about differences between Class D, A, or AB so much as I am asking about how can you tell the POWER an amp has from the specs?