Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Amps and Power, for Micah

John, I satisfy myself on a regular basis... er, oh wait that isn't what you meant is it?

Seriously though, I wish I could find the thread that gave me the opinion that I shared in your link. I'm guessing I understood what was discussed incorrect. It wasn't too long ago, and we were discussing the effects of having to double the wattage to achieve even just a few extra db's of output. After that fact was established I made the comment that if the 300 watts my XPA-3 was providing only produced 3 or 4 more db's of output than the 125 watts my Denon provided, then there was a BIG difference in those 3 or 4 db's. And as I remembered it, I thought you agreed that while 3 db's looks like not much on paper, in the real world a 3 db increase was in fact a substantial amount of volume.

As is seems, I guess I remembered that conversation incorrectly. I apologize for providing misleading information, but it wasn't intentional, I thought that was the verdict we'd come to. So anyway, that takes me back to square one in that area then. As I've discribed before, with the Denon I could only get the volume knob to around 90% max volume before the speakers sounded overloaded. There was obviously a lot of clipping occuring at this level. Once I hooked the M80's up to the Emotiva, taking the volume knob to the same position produced an extrodinary greater amount of volume (levels that I could not tollerate), but at the same time the speakers seemed to handle those levels with ease instead of sonding like they were about to break.

So now I'm left wondering, how could an amp that only produces a little over twice the power make that big of a difference in percieved volume? I know that the Denon had to have been making somewhere between 100 - 120 db's of output because at SRoodes house he was using a Denon similar in power rating as mine, and he showed me on his SPL meeter that we were listening at 100 db's. And we have the same equipment. And I have fully grasped notion that the volume position has nothing to do with how much power is being used between the two amps because of the power curve at play. But the way I understanding it, if my new amp can only add an extra 3 or 4 db's increase in volume, then why is the percieved output so much greater?