Watts and power

After a lot of listening and reading speaker specs here is what I feel to be true:

Amps, including solid state, are a lot more susceptible to low impedance in the bass region than we should expect by the common mathematical models.


If you have a speaker that dips below 4 Ohms in the 150Hz or lower region, that is a speaker I'd expect to come out as more "discerning" of amplifier gutsiness. You can also call that speaker more challenging, and less amplifier friendly. I've even seen speaker manufacturers deliberately make their speakers dip in this region, I suppose that the idea was that by dipping the speaker would be called more transparent, because you can hear the quality of different amps. I don't know why they did it, but i know they did.

I also think this is why cables seem to matter. Amps are more susceptible to variations in impedance than we think.

Most tube amps don't have "guts" in the bass due to low damping factor. You may prefer that or you may not and that will be room / speaker dependent. 


That dip in impedance is a factor of woofer electro-electromechanical properties and sometimes a 2.5/3.5 way folding in another driver. Crossover may shunt current from woofer to tame a peak.

I doubt that audio savvy people drive tube amps to clipping when actively listening unless that listening involves heavy drinking and dancing with lampshade headwear. I used to be able to easily demonstrate where my 12Wpc tube amp clipped because my main speakers were around 90db efficiency, but now that I'm using 99db horn loaded Heresy IIIs they simply get way too loud for that sort of thing. Still, I rely on tube distortion with guitar amps, but even in a "clean" mode they are so much better sounding overall that there's no contest with the silly "modeling" amps or any SS guitar amps. Some jazz dudes still use SS amps, but many don't (John Pizzarelli borrowed a little tube amp from me at a concert last year...a 15 watt Reverend Goblin, and the brilliant Matt Munisteri used a mint 64 Fender Princeton Reverb with Katherine Russell). Tubes "seem" faster and snappier in hifi and elsewhere. Or so they say, and I agree.

Can somebody break it down in layman's terms for me?

And so one after another all he gets is a bunch of technical info. When the answer in layman's terms is actually in this case absolutely identical to the answer in technical terms: THERE IS NO ANSWER IN TECHNICAL TERMS!

Every single one of the supposed answers above, most of which sound sensible, a few of which maybe even are, nevertheless are easily proven to be nonsense. All these things are at best factors. But remember- correlation is not causation!

What happens, and OP it will really help if you can learn this one early, is someone hears an amp that sounds unusually powerful compared to its watt rating. So they look for reasons. Perfectly natural thing to do, look for reasons. Let's say they find the amp is capable of delivering a lot of current. Wow that must be the reason! Unfortunately, sorry, BS, which is demonstrated as easily as listening to another low current amp that seems to sound just as powerful, if not even more so.

The same can be done for every single one of the other technical reasons listed above, and a whole lot more we haven't yet gotten around to. Not to worry, the people incapable of noticing the request for layman's terms are equally incapable of putting a damper on their need to show off with word salad. Er, technobabble. Er I mean technical knowledge.

Oh and by the way, you can go through and replace "power" and watts with just about anything you want- liquid vs etched, 3D vs flat, dynamic vs damped, any and all of it. Sometimes there's really good causes you can point to. When faster diodes are swapped and the sound improves its fairly easy to point to the speed and recovery of the diode. Although even then its wrong to say the speed is the reason- because there are even faster diodes that sound worse, and maybe even slower ones that sound better.

Now take that one part, the lowly diode, multiply it by a thousand for all the parts in a component. Then multiply that by a hundred for all the different circuit topologies (the way the circuits are physically laid out) then multiply that by a handful more for the way the chassis and, well you get the idea. Or at least I hope you do. There's just way more variables involved than you can ever hope to understand, let alone boil down to one simple number. To then point to that number and say, "THIS is why!" Is simplistic and shortsided in the extreme.

In a way, I like @millercarbon's answer, despite leaving me with the feeling that there really are no good answers.  So far, that squares with my experience; any time I think I see a correlation between any particular amp parameter and the quality of sound I hear, along comes another amp that breaks the rule.  Having said that, I would still like to find a book that tries to address how power, output current, speaker/crossover characteristics and other factors affect what we hear from a given amp/speaker pairing.  Does anyone know if such an animal exists?