I picked Diana Krall because her kind of jazz CDs don't have much DR, about 12 dB I guess, so it is very easy to see the average SPL even without measurement instruments. The use of a digital Hioki meter was just to confirm my not so reliable visual judgment.
When I measure peaks I prefer to use classical music. In the past I have seen peaks >20W even with my more sensitive KEF and Focal speakers playing classical music disc that I know has high DRs.
My quick measurement session was done to demo one can listen to average SPL of 85 dB with peaks >90dB when the amp is outputting 1W or less and less than 0.5A with peaks no greater than 10W. That's RMS current, so for peaks it could be much higher depending on the waveform but would still be under 1A in any case. Still, it just shows that while I believe in more power the better, it isn't true to think most people are actually hearing day and night kind of difference as soon as they swap out their mid range AVR such as a Yamaha RXV-2010's internal amp with a 200WPC power amp. Hence my feeling that people often exaggerate the effect of adding an external amp on sound quality, and I guess that could be understandable, given what they have been told prior, anticipating and having spent the money.
