Well, Randy, with all this bumping going on and since I've finally read this, I'll point out that maybe some of the research that you mention has accidentally led into the land of the practitioners of voodoo audio. Watts are in fact the bottom line(often fewer of them than is sometimes imagined)and if a watt is deivered with flat response over the 20-20KHz audible range(or maybe more realistically 15KHz for most of us, as Ian among others has pointed out)and with inaudibly low noise and distortion, that's all that any amplifier can do; there ain't no more. All the other factors in amplifier design technology(damping factor, capacitance, slew rate, etc. etc.)lead to this end result.
Some of the material linked in the past here includes the capacitance discussion on Rod Elliott's
Westhost technology site in the "Increasing capacitance" section and in the following "Major myth regarding capacitance" section. There are rules of thumb regarding the amount of capacitance needed(e.g., 100uF per watt)in the power supply section to smooth out the pulses of AC power enough so that the the PSRR(power supply rejection ratio)of the amplifying section can handle it without audible flaws. This and more precise calculations result in requirements in the tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands of uF; more doesn't somehow become audibly better.
Another topic discussed here in the past was damping factor and the explanation by engineer and speaker designer Dick Pierce in
Audioholics was cited. Bottom line is that anything in the double digits is fine. Just about any well-designed modern amp does this, except for some tube designs which have a factor around one or two and are obviously for this and other reasons not designed with the highest fidelity in mind. Damping factor specs in the hundreds or even thousands are seen on occasion, but are audibly meaningless; again, more doesn't mean better.
