Too Much Power


Please bear with me as I am nowhere near an expert at this type of thing...

I recently read a review of the PS Audio Stellar M1200 mono amps. I was somewhat taken aback by their power rating of  600 watts at 8 ohms/1200 watts at 4 ohms. Made me wonder what, if any, are the drawbacks to that much power? Welcome your thoughts...

gnoworyta

Making a statement that 5 watts is all you need is ridiculous and it also doesn’t  mean 5 watts of class a power is all you need. I’ve had Classe monoblocks that had much more than 5 watts in class a mode and hundreds in class a/ab mode.

Get the best amp you can afford with power that is 2 or 3x more then you need for your speakers. No 5 watt amp will drive a pair of magnapan 20.1’s, but you can get a quality a - a/b amp with hundreds of watts that will make your 96db speakers you might have today sing as well as 86db speakers you might buy in the future. Decades ago, I went with amps that were rated 10x what the manufacturer recommended and they sounded the best compared to the same manufacturer other amps that were only 2-3x more powerful 

I’ve seen more speakers blown from accidents, like pulling an interconnect with the amp on, or volume set at full blast than the supposed danger of harmonic distortion from clipping burning out tweeters.  That sort of extreme distortion is so obvious that no half intelligent person would allow such abuse to go on long enough for the tweeters to go.  Unnecessary reserves of power do not protect your speakers—they only tempt one to over drive the speakers.

with speakers rated at 900 watts and have little concern about over powering or damaging them

You have a home audio speaker that can take 900 watts?

I bought these to replace a Peachtree 220. They are light weight, dead quiet and sound great. I got an offer from PS Audio to trade them for a BHK Stereo 250 so I accepted and shipped the monoblocks back. The 250 is a lot noisier but is creamy and wonderful.  Too much power is better than not enough, and you would have to turn up the volume almost all the way to get close to the maximum output. The 250 watts is more than I need because my speakers have powered subwoofers and the input impedance is over 20 ohms at low frequencies.