When browsing Catalogs of Audio equipment, power seems to be a dominant purchasing criterion. Numbers like 100W, 1´000W or even 10´000 Watts are printed on the average Ghettoblaster that connect to a measly 20W power supply. So clearly something´s not right. So what does power mean, and how much is enough.
Well, power really only depends on how loud you would like to play your music, how big a room or space you would like to experience that loudness, how much sound that space reflects back, and how efficient your rig is to convert electricity into sound.
Gladly the experts at Crown Audio have done the math and testing for us and they came back with some ballpark figures of power required for different venues and sound levels.
So let´s start big and work our way down. How about Rock or heavy metal music played in a stadium, arena or amphitheater for a crowd of tens of thousands. Big enough for you? Well venues like that use anything from 4´000W to 15`000W so no, your average boom box does not have 10´000W, ask your electricity company if you like or have them tell you by means of your light bill.
So let´s look at something smaller: How about Pop or jazz music in a 2000-seat concert hall. A venue like that will use anything between 400W to 1´000W. Put something like that in your average living room and you will experience physical pain, deafness, and last not least, controversial relationships with your neighbors and perhaps structural damage to your building.
So how about folk music in a coffee shop with 50 seats: 25 to 250 W not more.
An you in your average sized living room, listening at a level that is loud, but not louder than what the National Institute of Health considers the threshold for permanent hearing damage? Well 25Watts. That´s all. Who would have figured?
The real story is about the quality of the sound, how much distortion is in the music. So we have dimensioned our incredibly small Microfidelity amplifiers and speakers at 2X40W with only 0.04% distortion.
And with that, let´s get back to what really matters beyond the physics and the numbers: The emotional experience of listening to unadulterated, organically produced music played and recorded by the masters of their craft.