Mark, thanks for time reading the post.
About the Fluke meter. It allows to capture short peaks, down to 250 microseconds (it’s one period of 4 kHz tone). While by no means it is as fast as a scope, I thought it was good enough for practical purposes. The Fluke was connected right to the speaker’s posts, and the 8 Ohms constant resistance was assumed for power calculation. The SPL was measured for both single tone and music tests.
By no means a 100% accurate test, I think it correctly captures some very practical moments. One of which is it takes less than 1W of average power per main channel to listen at my threshold of loudness. I agree, it’s personal, and some people might like it much louder. At the same level the peaks reach at about 10W or so which is still much less than the dynamic power of the receiver.
As far as comparing the sound quality from a distant memory…. I think JohnK already alluded that only a carefully designed double blind test can prove or disprove that. Other than that it’s only on the personal level of perception.
But, here is a thing. There are trade-offs. My other hobby is photography. You’d be surprised how many people buy ten’s of thousand dollars worth of equipment and then spend all their time taking pictures of brick walls, comparing the sharpness of this to that, resolution of this to that… No money left over to make good prints or travel to photographic locations.
I can afford a $2,000 amp. But the same money can get me a bunch of DVDs and CD’s and a few tickets to good concerts. I’d rather do that then succumbing to a questionable sound improvement. But, it’s me, everybody’s mileage is different.
