Hi Todd,
JohnK's advice is excellent, but ask yourself when you are listening, Does the signal sound clean and distortion-free (assuming you are using a good recording)? Or does it become congested and muddy as you increase the volume?
It seems to me you likely have enough power, but the old maxim "you can never have too much power" still applies. JohnK is correct in that having hundreds of watts in reserve may be a waste if you never utilize that power.
Our personal taste in playback levels varies quite a lot from one person to the next and the room size can be a huge factor.. As I've noted on these boards in the past, several of my colleagues in much larger rooms than my own listen at extremely loud levels and on occasion have caused large monoblocs at 250 watts per channel to shut down. (I had to leave the house it was so loud.) They were listening to high-power rock and pop at what to me were absurdly loud levels.
I've never detected these alleged changes in the quality of the sound ("better bass; "fuller sound" etc.) by substituting much larger amplifiers in place of a well-designed receiver when all the variables are controlled. Of course this will change if you go for very high SPLs in big rooms. I'm running a pair of M80ti's with about 80 watts per channel in my modest (2,100 cu. ft.) living room and it is clean and distortion-free at the loudest levels I ever listen at (peaks up to 98 dB SPL about 10 feet away from the speakers). If I were in a much larger room--say 5,000 cu ft or larger--I'd likely bring my 250 watt per channel amp out of the closet to run the M80s.
Of course given the huge psycho-acoustic biases at play when uncontrolled tests are performed (typical of many so-called high-end magazine reviewers), if you think you'll hear an improvement when you switch to a much larger, separate power amp, then you likely will hear it. Is the improvement real? In a sense it is, if you believe it. . .
Regards,
