Amp's nominal power rating - any use?


I just paired a couple of Coincident Frankentein monos with my SF Guarneri Homage. The sound is great (fat, rich, dynamic, transparent) and sounds well with any type of music (opera, rock, electronic...). These are 8W monoblocks and sound like with more power or at least the same as my previous fabulous pass aleph 3 (30W class A SS). Of course it depends if tubes not tubes, class A or not, speaker sensitivity, impedance load, room dimensions etc, but what i see is that it's not a relevant criteria at all on its own. Maybe there should be some transformation formula to take into account some of these factors to get some Apparent or Perceived Power, but maybe it would be hard to take into account all factors. Any ideas, opinions, on this?
dongiovanni

Showing 2 responses by kijanki

Just calculating perceived loudness:

(30W/8W)^(1/3.5)=1.459 30W is 45.9% louder than 8W but only in identical conditions. These power rating apply to max rms power and are pretty much useless with music. Peak power is more interesting since average music power is only a few percent of it (unless one listens to sine-waves). You don't really know how much of peak power each amp can deliver and it is not even possible to measure distortions at the peaks. Without measuring you perhaps push each amp to limits of audible distortions that are much less audible in even harmonics generating tube amp (even many percent) than odd harmonics generating SS amp (fraction of percent). Interaction with the speaker, being complex load, might also be different for tube and SS amps.
Irvrobinson - let me explain. Average music power delivered to speakers is very low - just a few percent of peak power. It is because music on average doesn't go more than half of the loudness and that means 1/10 of the power. In addition music has gaps. Amplifier's max continuous rms power is completely irrelevant. What is important is peak power that amp can deliver.

Imagine two amps:

1. 10W rms, 100W peak
2. 100W rms, 100W peak

In my opinion they will have exactly the same max loudness with music signal.