Mapman, Thanks for your comments!
I think the goal should be to have the illusion of the performance being
in the "room" with the listener. Realistically, this is best achieved
with dynamic, high current capable speakers hooked to fully balanced
push-pull high current/high powered amp(s). Class A or A/B sound best
to my ear. All aspects of a system contribute to the overall gestalt of
course, but flea watt amps will not pressurize a room and deliver the
dynamic control necessary to give you the excitement of being in the
presence of live musicians. Wilson, Krell, Dynaudio etc...can deliver
full scale music without constraint (upper end models). None of this
matters if you do not have the right cables, power cords, preamp and
source(s). This does not mean that there aren't any other number of
ways to get beautiful, lively and engaging music in the home...there are
a myriad of ways for sure, but "live" sounding, unconstrained dynamic
and accurate reproduction of the source requires a wide bandwidth power
amp with lot's of headroom. I left out horn systems and super high
efficiency designs because I have not heard any that could do what I
required of them to put me in the presence of the performers, especially
at realistic volume levels while maintaining accurate tone and
soundstaging. Of course...IMHO!
I find that a better model for what a stereo should do it that it can graft the room onto the particular musical event as it is happening.
'High current' as stated above is not needed though. What is needed is the combination of power and efficiency such that the system does not have to strain to present the music at a life-like level. Horns have no troubles doing accurate tone and soundstaging; they can do that in spades. So as long as you have the headroom its all good. I use the same rule of thumb for almost any amplifier- don't run it much past about 20% of full power for best results. This usually means the speaker has to have some efficiency.
Now its also an interesting phenomena that if you want a system to sound more like real music, its to your advantage to run a loudspeaker of higher impedance; 8 ohms being better than 4 and 16 being better than 8. This is because nearly all amplifiers have lower distortion into higher impedances and that can be heard as smoother and more detailed. Because of this simple fact (which you can see in almost all amplifier spec sheets BTW) 'high current' is not essential as you don't need high current for 16 ohms.
There is always some debate by what is meant by high current. To sort out a lot of the marketing hype I use the Power formula. It turns out that for most speakers you need a lot less current than is usually thought. For example to do 500 watts into a 4 ohm load you only need 7.9 amps.
