MarkTheShark

MarkTheShark

Audioholic Intern
MarkTheShark:
are your spatials going to look like these? If they are, what cool looking speakers.
There are so many companies and products I have never heard of or never seen that I still feel brand new to a lifelong hobby. They look terrific, I can only assume they will have sound to match.


Hi Buck, yes those are the bad boys. I should be getting them in the next few weeks. The bookshelf speakers I currently use sound great but don't quite fill the room. I was considering the Magnepan .7 and then I came across the Spatial M3 and M4s. The open Baffle design is very interesting, they have great reviews and need less power than the Magnepans. The M3 is slightly larger than the M4 and has a little more bass, so I am hoping to ditch my sub.
 
M

MrBoat

Audioholic Ninja
the OP's question was will 300w sound better than 80w given the same db level of listening, amp quality etc.
I think the answers given are illuminating and fairly stated: unless you need the headroom provided by a more powerful amp, one is not likely to hear much of a difference. Caveat caveat caveat, YMMV.

I would just like to echo the OP's line of thinking: for years I always thought the more powerful the amp the better the sound. I think I bought in to the general idea because that's how audio is often portrayed: the more powerful the better. Somewhere along the trail I read an article called "The First Watt". The basic premise being most people listen at modest levels, so who cares how many watts you have if your first watt sounds like crap.

That thought began my journey and search that ends up right where we are now: one only needs as much good quality power (plus some headroom) as you usually listen to. For most of us, that means we don't really need or will ever take advantage of big power amps.

Rational thought says we don't need big power. If you study human beings, we make a lot of decisions on irrational terms. I don't need a big power amp. I surely don't. But that won't stop me from buying one some day when a big check arrives and I find one with the right colored knobs and VU meters on it.:D
Back then, the consensus (maybe still is) was, the lower you could stay on the volume knob, with matching watt speakers, the further you lived out of distortion range. We always tried to live with a system that was unbearably loud by the time it got to 50% on the dial max.
 
MarkTheShark

MarkTheShark

Audioholic Intern
A pair of BMWs? Awesome! That definitely could cut into the AV budget ;)
Yes lovinthehd, the BMWs are digging into the budget :). But I think I'll have a good system with each piece a good value. Looking forward to breaking them in.
 
P

PENG

Audioholic Slumlord
People seem to equate more power with better sound. What I find it actually tends to be is that you can achieve higher SPL before distortion and people often automatically equate louder with "better". That "opened up" sound is really just higher SPL. Those are two different things but are perceived as the same.

To add to that, there are two things there - people who actually don't have sufficient power for the SPL they're looking for and thus it sounds poor, and people who want better sound. Two subtly different things to me - one doesn't know what they need or that they are basically abusing their system and the second is looking for "better sound" out of what they have and thinks that power will make it sound "better" (though that can ultimately be a lot of things, often poor speaker choice).
And to add some more, my guess is that most people, like me, would not hesitate to crank the volume right up as soon as they have a power amp hooked up to their AVR preouts. So naturally the speakers "open up" and they started to hear more details, deeper sound stage, ability to locate the instruments and much better bass performance.

After having some fun and excitement at higher spl, they turned the volume back down to their normally preferred level, but by then their hearing sense have already learnt/adapted to what they heard at higher volume, so it would have become much easier and possible for them to hear and/or imagine the otherwise missing sound information. Hence they started to believe even at low level listening, the sound quality has improved with the addition of the powerful amp.
 
hondajake

hondajake

Junior Audioholic
My 30 watt tube amp sounds better than the 200wpc amp it replaced-
 
hondajake

hondajake

Junior Audioholic
Yes different, pleasing to me and spl is great with Klipsch Cornwalls
 
P

PENG

Audioholic Slumlord
Any yet there are many who claimed more powerful amps sound better even at low volume, yet they typically won't elaborate on what low volume means. So much myths that don't die and will never die.
 

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