Basic question about power/watts

Hey everybody!! 

Thanks so much!

Frantically looking up all the eqpt that has been recommended..

So much great advice.

@russ69.... I loved the "buy once, cry once". Perfect! I think I will shed some tears but you just made a heap of sense to me🙂

OP,

I would take your time and enjoy the process. Don’t be in a hurry. It is important to read through the hype and think about what you value. Make it a fun and calculated  process. There is a lot of ambiguity in what vendors are selling, what you want, and how it will work together.

Slow, thoughtful decisions are the way to go. As you develop a solid sense of what you want, your ability to differentiate subtleties in sound quality will develop. So, for instance, adding a subwoofer could be a great solution for you… for now. Then 10 or 15 years from now that would be something that doesn’t work at all for you.

Read, read, read… think about what you are hearing and what you want. When you are sure you have found a match… act. Then evaluate, did what you expect happen? Listen for a few hundred hours. Then plan you next step.

@ghdprentice 

+1, good counsel.

Charles

Dear Tim in Texas,
Yep, a little too late, yet . . . Maggies in general are very sensitive (fastidious) to the choice of amplifier. I also owned the Magnepans .7 (+ two REL's 'Quake') and fed these with the power of a 4 Ohms 500 Watts Dussun V8i. An absolute great combination sounding absolutely great too. As an ESL-lover I later switched to Martin Logan Vantage. I was shocked. An absolute mess! Boomy, harsh and loud. Even at low volumes. So I changed my Dussun for a 'Luxman L-120A'. 2x 160 watts at 4 Ohm with a great multi Hz tone control. What a relief! Music like live. So the Maggies are never to blame. A bad combination of speakers and the amplifier is. So, no worry. No hurry too. Just try and listen before you buy and you certainly will find the Maggies-amp combination that will make you extremely happy. Good luck!

First, understand that speakers are not a pure resistive load, so "watts" from the amplified doesn't equate directly to "watts" at the speaker. Most amps give rated power into strictly resistive load (e.g. 8 ohms, 4 ohms, etc.) and if the speaker was a resistor, then yes "watts is watts".  However, since the speaker receives an A/C signal, and there are various elements in the speaker that have capacitance or inductance, you need to think in terms of "impedance" not resistance. Meaning, the signal voltage and signal current at the speaker will not be in-phase (i.e. max or min current won't align with max or min voltage), and that difference is called the phase angle. For a real world speaker, the phase angle can reach +/- 45 degrees (for a resistor, that angle is zero). So the actual power delivered to the speaker is a function of the cosine of the phase angle, and this is basically the Power Factor, and the power supplied by the amp.  So this can be as low as 0.707 for a real world speaker, meaning the amp must supply ~4 watts at the output devices for the speaker to "see" 1 watt.  Worse, the phase angle will change for different frequencies, so the frequency response (not just overall volume) is also affected when the amp can't supply sufficient power. So you have to figure that a 50w @ohm amp/receiver is likely to be capable of less than 12 watts for a given "4-ohm" speaker at worse-case (relative to power factor) frequencies.

Better quality amp manufacturers will take phase angle into consideration and have a sufficient number of output devices and power supply stiffness to accommodate the increase in instantaneous current load requirements (headroom available) for most real-world speakers.

Can't comment on the Maggies specifically since I'm not a dipole kind of guy.

Good luck!