Quote:
Originally Posted by decooney
A discussion about required power vs. speaker efficiency from the other thread. https://www.audioaficionado.org/show...postcount=5349
A friend has a pair of huge 103DB custom Altec Onken speakers we built (3 pairs in fact), with the largest horns made from Altec. We played and tested these speakers with a 3wpc 2A3 amp, 5w and 8wpc 300B Audio Note Triode mono amps with best parts available including massive transformers and vintage WE300B tubes. We then tried it with my 50wpc strapped triode map. Nobody was expecting what occurred. The results were interesting.
The former 50-year tech and proud owner of these large Onken speakers along with a few other of his friends commented "how much more grunt" added presence and impact the larger 50wpc amp provided playing these 103db@1W speakers provided compared to all of the fleawatt amps he tried. The interesting part of this is nobody with the fleawatt amps was expecting anything close to these results. I heard the same 50wpc Triode strapped amp with upgraded Harbeth 40.1 speakers. Good fun trying different things to see what happens  Guess we never know til' we try it. |
Like anything there are trade-off's to low and higher power amps. With higher power you can crank the volume, soundstage gets expansive, dynamics and bass have impact and it will fill a large room with volume. However tone, texture and timbre are often not as good. My high power tube amps and Wilson W/P are great for a big sound. But in my smaller room the low power 6v6 Inspire leaves the big system in the dust when it comes to sounding real on Sax, Trumpet, and voice. Good to have both sounds.