Your certainly have taken a 360 on your stance on amplification...
We all know you mean a 180.
And Sirquack if it's your opinion that 3 db's is 'barely noticable' then you're welcome to that opinion. My opinion differs from yours however. I know I listened to my M80's played through my Denon for a good 8 months played at 0 on the volume scale. Then the day I hooked them up to the Emotiva and set the volume level to 0 (instinctually) I damn near blew the windows out of the living room and gave the dog a heart attack. There was no need to pull out an SPL meter to tell me that they were playing RIDICULOUSLY LOUD!!! That was plenty obvious already.
Besides my whole point of telling that story was because previous to that experience I had assumed that the levels would be equal until I got to the very top, and then it would go higher... in other words, I really hadn't thought about it much. But when I almost blasted myself clean out of my seat it dawned on me that when the Denon was running things at 0 it was probably feeding my speakers with around 100 watts. But then once I hooked up the Emotiva, at 0 they were probably getting more like 240 watts.
Which brings me to a point I forgot to mention, above 0 on the Denon things started to get a little shakey... it really sounded as if I was pushing the limits of my M80's (perhaps because I was starting to drive them into 'clipping'). However once I fed them their rated power supply, taking the volume knob ALL the way up gave me nothing but smooth (although insanely loud) performance without that element of fearing for their lives.
In short, trying to crank them without enough power made them sound strained, and I always had the impression they were about to break. Cranking them with their rated power supply showed me that they are not 'delicate' speakers at all. The fact of the matter is they are capable of volumes beyond anything you would ever play them at, and still keep their composure when pushed to those levels. There is a reason they refer to them as 'LOUD speakers'!
