What is your experience with amp power?

For 15 years I’ve been running Tannoys, between 91 - 96dB. I play loud. I like tubes. I don’t think I’ve gotten to the point yet where I have "too much" power. My most powerful amps, 250 Watts/ch and 300 Watts/ch tube monoblocks, have had distinct advantages in dynamics, bass, and "driver grip". Yes, even on the big 96dB / Watt Tannoys! I’ve gotten great sound with lower power amps, but there are clear advantages in the higher power levels that you won’t get until you get there. Headroom matters. My 300 Watt VAC Master monos in particular are just in another world of performance compared to all prior amps - the 200 Watts/ch 200iQ monos (really more like 140 Watts./ch into 8 ohms) aren’t even in the same zip code.

I think higher power also greatly lowers the risk of "problems", in my experience. With a vinyl source there can be a lot of feedback and LF energy to deal with, and you DON’T want to risk the amp clipping from that. It' always better to have the extra headroom. 

If you listen at "75 - 80dB peaks max" or whatever, then you can safely ignore my observations :)

Mono-blocks>bi-amp

That is generally my experience as well, though some solid state amps will sound worse when "bridged" to mono. With tube amps I’ve definitely heard substantial improvements going to mono. If the amp was designed to be a monoblock (not switchable), then you’re golden.

Having that head room and power even with highly efficient speakers make for a much better listening experience. No straining, no clipping, ease of presentation. In my experience my Tannoys are 95 db efficient and I drive them with a 500wpc McIntosh amp. When I first got the amp I thought it would literally blow me out of the room, but that wasn’t my experience. I think I’d be hard pressed to go down in wattage.

Yep, same here! Big Tannoys with a lot of quality power behind them => limitless dynamics, lifelike sound :)

I know my Tannoys can sound great with 25 - 35 Watts, I used to do that, but when you hit a need for power these amps won’t be able to deliver no matter their PSU design. Certainly, one could get through a lot of musical material before hitting a dynamic transient that’s going to either cause compression or hard clip on that lower power amp (yes, tube amps can hard clip too). But it’s there. Vinyl setups also have to content with higher playback power demands from feedback, warps and resonance issues - you try to mitigate this but it’s always there. More power freed me from these issues - and then I also noticed the other benefits of cleaner, lower distortion, and extended frequency range playback from the extra headroom. When you hit a huge dynamic swing, +10dB or more can happen very quickly, and while your 35 Watt amp could melt your ears off all day with with KISS (with no dynamic range) you’d really need 300 Watts to play that orchestral peak cleanly.

To be honest, there are a lot of inaccurate statements in this thread. I am guessing that only a few people here know design and have experience in building an audio component.

Are there really inaccurate/false statement in this thread, or is it just perspectives and experiences that don’t match with yours? If it’s truly a false statement, it can be decisively refuted with math & physics.

One of the common perspectives I disagree with is (paraphrasing) - "doubling power is only 3dB and that’s not much anyways". 3dB is a lot! You can TOTALLY hear a huge difference in 3dB. Find your "preferred" listening volume, then adjust up or down by 3dB - it sucks! 1dB was loosely determined as the "audibility threshold" a long time ago, but the subtext there is *for casual listeners*. It’s more meaningful for a seasoned audiophile. When dealing with say L/R channel imbalances, you can certainly notice down to a third of a decibel, at least.

Another perspective I don’t share is that paralleling multiple outputs (tubes, transistors) imposes some kind of sonic penalty. Definitely NOT in my experience. If anything, the aberrant characteristics of one particular device can get averaged/smoothed out by the others (that’s good). The choice of device itself matters a lot (of course), but if the PSU and OPT and driver circuitry can handle it then the more the merrier I say. Bridging is a different story, as is stacking extra gain stages - both of these can certainly impose performance penalties in the pursuit of higher power and higher volumes.

I definitely get folks who prefer the sonic character of say 6L6 or EL34 (I love both of those tubes) over the more austere KT88/KT120, but I bet a properly done high power amp with lots of paralleled (say) 6L6GC would be pretty amazing - you just don’t see those on the market. Manley does have their NeoClassic with lots of EL34, but I haven’t heard it yet - looks interesting.

Why Do Tweeters Blow When Amplifiers Distort? See below:
Mike

https://sound-au.com/tweeters.htm#a6

That site is normally a good source of information, but that particular section "6 Bigger Amplifiers" seems short sighted to me:

• It assumes that a hapless user, when given more power capacity, will simply crank the volume in an attempt to recreate the Maxell ad. OK, I like it loud but I’m not that stupid lol.
• It ignores the fact that music source material has decreasing energy content (amplitude) as frequency rises. This means that most of the musical energy energy is handled by woofers, not the tweeter. Speaker designers respond by designing speakers with much higher power handling in the woofer section. Quite reasonably, it’s difficult to create a tweeter with very high power handling that doesn’t adversely affect its cost and HF performance. Result: speakers can handle their rated power levels IF the spectrum content of the program material is "correct". Led Zep: OK. Lady Gaga: OK. Pink or Brown noise: OK. White noise: NOT OK. Amp clipping: NOT OK.
• An amp that’s clipping on a high amplitude low frequency wave form will create a squared waveform that suddenly now carries a LOT of high frequency energy. This HF content was NOT in the source material, but it’s now going right into the tweeter - which was not designed to handle such high peak levels of energy! Its amplitude is proportional to the LF waveform (very high amplitude - the max allowable by the amp's rail voltage) that’s being clipped, which is way higher than you’d see HF content in nature. That’s why it sounds SO BAD and kills tweeters.