magiccarpetride
07-03-2011, 19:35
As some of you might recall, I've been recently auditioning high wattage power amps. The reason I'm exploring that area is my Maggies, who are extremely inefficient, and thus power hungry speakers. People in the know have advised me to consider feeding them more wattage in order to achieve larger headroom which should, in their opinion, make the Maggies sing better even during very quiet passages. Supposedly, high wattage amps will be straining less to drive Maggies, which should result in a more relaxed, pleasant presentation.
One thing left me completely dumbfounded, and I was hoping someone would be able to clarify this for me: I'm using DPA 200s separates for my amplification. This power amp is rated at 40 watts per channel. When I crank the volume up to 10:00, 10:30 am, I get it plenty loud. Going higher than that, say to 11:00 - 11:30 am, would mean that the music is playing very loud. Pushing it over 12:00 noon results in a volume where it's getting to be quite uncomfortable, as the windows, doors and even walls start shaking and trembling.
This being the case, I was shocked to see that, in order to achieve the same loudness with those 500 watts per channel beasts, I would have to push them all the way up to 3:00 pm, which is almost double the volume I'm using now.
Intuitively, I would expect the opposite to hold true; if I'm using a 40 watts per channel amp at 10:00 am to achieve decent volume, using a ten times more powerful amp should get me to the same loudness if I place the dial much lower, say below 8:00 am.
What's in this math am I getting wrong?
One thing left me completely dumbfounded, and I was hoping someone would be able to clarify this for me: I'm using DPA 200s separates for my amplification. This power amp is rated at 40 watts per channel. When I crank the volume up to 10:00, 10:30 am, I get it plenty loud. Going higher than that, say to 11:00 - 11:30 am, would mean that the music is playing very loud. Pushing it over 12:00 noon results in a volume where it's getting to be quite uncomfortable, as the windows, doors and even walls start shaking and trembling.
This being the case, I was shocked to see that, in order to achieve the same loudness with those 500 watts per channel beasts, I would have to push them all the way up to 3:00 pm, which is almost double the volume I'm using now.
Intuitively, I would expect the opposite to hold true; if I'm using a 40 watts per channel amp at 10:00 am to achieve decent volume, using a ten times more powerful amp should get me to the same loudness if I place the dial much lower, say below 8:00 am.
What's in this math am I getting wrong?