wattage


I have seen prior threads on this, but none recently that can answer how many watts from an amp are truly necessary.
Take an inefficient speaker, say 86 w/db. at 98 db (which will harm hearing when sustained) 16 watts would be required. Even doubling this to account for transients would be available at 32 watts. Strickly
from an engineering standpoint, are more than 40 watts really necessary? No audiophile terms like bloom, and slam needed.
Regards.
RJ
tennisdoc40
As for playing the numbers game, you would also have to factor in the effect of heating of the voice coil. As you increase the current flowing in the voice coil, it heats up and resistance increases so that each additional increment of power delivers less and less increase in acoustic output (this is a major source of compression). Also, mechanically, as the drivers are pushed towards the limits of their excursion, there is an increase in the mechanical resistance which further increases compression. Hence, much more power is really needed that those simple formula suggest to get to a particular SPL level.

That said, for the most part, I agree with those who believe that the recommendations on power greatly exaggerate how much is needed. Give me quality over quantity any day.
I appreciate the feedback. I have a 100 wpc ss amplifier powering speakers with 91 db sensitivity and the woofer having it's own class D amplifier. I was demoing a 150 wpc amp of the same brand and preferred the sound of the lower powered amp, even though it's listed peak amperage was lower. Growing up, we thoroughly enjoyed music powered by a Sansui receiver at 30 wpc through 16 gauge speaker wire from Radio Shack.
The music flows just fine with my 60 to 80 watts or so tube amp…150 in the mosfet sub…dynamic all day (my speakers are maybe 89 db efficient although rated as higher). A note about clean dynamic power…I have super clean mui powerful amps used for live sound work, and if you ran one into virtually ANY home stereo speaker (love to demonstrate this with Magicos or something…owned by somebody else of course) that supposedly can handle some power, put a mic on a kick drum through a clean mixer and gave it some uncompressed beans (even flat with no bass boost with the amp on maybe 20%), you'd be lucky to hear a quick "splort" before the speaker self destructed. I'm not sure what my point is…but that's reality.
it always depends.

in this case it depends on how loud you need to go with various recordings and assuming speakers are capable of doing it in your room without strain or compressing.

Generalizations may apply but generalizations seldom yield exceptional performance.

The devil is always in the details.

I have a 60 w/ch integrated running lower efficiency spekaers in a large room and the results are fine up to a point but are limited compared to essentially the same but somewhat larger speakers in another large room running off similar but 500w/ch amps. There is no comparison of overall dynamics and musicality at realistic listening volumes but at typical modest volumes both do similarly fine.