whats your idea of loud music.

I mostly agree with the above. But since when does WPC indicate loud? Good sounding loud any way. Driver excursion, SPL, and control is far more important than WPC, any day, and this requires amperage, not just voltage.

BWOE, I have experimented with a pair of AB International 1100A's that I have vs. the pair of Protons I use, the Protons sound much more musical, and have the same output dB as far as my ears are concerned, given my listening rooms size. The Protons are 110wpc, the AB International's are 550wpc. Different amplifiers obviously, but they both do the same thing.

There comes a point when a room can only tolerate "x" amount of SPL, any more than that and it sounds like crap, imaging goes out the window because your ears can not decipher the music from all the reverberation due to inherent room acoustics.

It took me quite a long time to get my cross-overs "tuned" or dialed in to my particular room w/my given drivers of choice. Move to the middle and the sound was ok, move to the back and it was bass heavy, and so on and so forth. The wave form created by a specfic speaker driver became completely different depending on placement, and crossover point. Where I wanted a given freq. with in the room was a chore to say the least.

All this is very driver (raw) dependent. Even with all the experimenting I did, certain electronics, esp. speakers have a sound of their own, no matter how much power you add to the mix.

Why did I ramble on? Because loud equates to SPL IMO, not WPC. So, for a given person, 90dB might be loud, but for people like myself, I prefer "live" levels, because I listen to a lot of "live" recorings. But studio recorded music (atleast for me) doesn't require the same power to be enjoyable. For me the essence of the source material is different, and my ears tell my brain this when I listen to a given type of music, loud is dependent upon the music type there fore, and not WPC.

A BIG LOL to Mike the biker and Elizebeth.

Loud wont hurt you until it becomes such that it over powers the ears mechanical abilities to discren frequencies, and this is quite beyond 110dB, thus causing mechanical defect/damage to the working parts ofthe ears and the need for hearing aids- LOUD rarely causes this, most often unchecked bacterial invasion is the culprit.

If the Sound is loud, yet undistorted, more often then not, no hearing function is, or, will be lost. Want proof?
Ask all the ENT doc's whom own Krell systems. Or, some one who has been into Audio for more then 20 years- BTW, I hear just fine, better then most for that matter.

Seems to me there is some difficulty with what a dB is and how it relates to the ability of the human ear, and hearing. 80dB is not very loud at all, but then is 150db loud to a jet mechanic? Not to me- I wear ear phones.

The source may PEAK at 120-150dB, but real music is not a peak measurement, it's dynamic, soft vrs. loud, that is the output level I speak of, not some constant number that means nothing to the listener's enjoyment, or real world or live listening levels.

I wonder if all the musicians on the planet that play live shows at 150dB car hear, um, yes, and some of them own very nice ultra high end systems and tell the diff. when a particular note was missed.

Hmm?