Damping factor or watts?

The claim that high wattage combined w/ high damping factor is expensive is an urban legend.

Damping factor needs to be at least above 10 and above 50 it will make very little incremental difference.

Watts are essential in any amp but around 200 Watts into 8 Ohms is all you need...after that it is diminishing returns.

Shadorne is pretty much on the money, as are the other posts here. In audio its easy to make a small fortune- start out with a large one :)

In this case, buying by the specs (when it is your ears that ultimately matter), is going to flush a lot of money away. So be careful! If you would like some hints, the Magnaplaner people claim that the best they have heard their speakers is with tube amplifiers. They tell me that every time I see them.

Good Luck!

Icepower is class D - has high power, high DF and is not astronomically expensive (to answer your question).

I stated previously what ideal DF should be and I feel I should explain it more. In ideal world high DF would be great - but in real life it is often achived by strong global negative feedbacks resulting in tons of TIM and unpleasant bright hi-fiish sound. Recently many companies design amps with shallow feedback or no feedback at all. Yes DF is low but they sound great.

About power: Quality of sound is inversly proportional to amp's power (revolutionary statement!). 100W amp sounds better than 200W amp - let me explain: For the same amount of money you can find better sounding 100W amp than 200W amp. There is a lot of estate needed to make 2x more power but you can barely hear the difference when power is doubled.

In addition to all this - different amplifiers (and technologies) sound so much different - don't go by the spects. Icepower has good spects but specific sound - I like it (and have it) you might hate it.

There's a lot of myth about power, gain, and DF. There is no universal, all encompassing rule. The age old JBL reinforcement manual recommends an amp with 2x the rated power, in watts, of the speaker at like impedances for optimal driver control. Dare somebody with a pair of original Ohm Walsh's to try putting 2x the power into them!(If you're silly enough to try they still make replacement parts). Bottom line, read the specs only to make sure you're not doing anything dangerous, then trust your ears. It's far to easy and tempting or manufacturers to confuse, hide, or outright lie to end users on the spec sheet