Hi Mad_Chesser,
You are bang-on with this thinking. If you want it loud and clean you need two things. Lots of dynamic headroom and speakers that can take huge peaks of power. We tend to get overly obsessed with things like RMS power ratings and continuous max SPL from a speaker but these are not the major parts of the equation. In an amplifier things like lots of capacitance in the power supply and the ability to have voltage sag are the important parts, as they create the multiple possible for the dynamic peaks. The RMS power rating creates the base that the dynamic headroom is calculated from so it is important from that point to view. But if the multiple is 1 (like in receivers) or 1.5 you will not get loud and clean. The actual continuous power you will need is not going to be the limiting factor, it will be the dynamic peaks. A quick look at the math shows this. To have 15 dB of dynamic headroom at 100 watts of continuous power will equate to a max dynamic peak of 3200 watts; 12 dB of dynamic headroom would be 1600 watts. That is some serious power that needs to be delivered cleanly for a brief moment. This where capacitance and voltage sag become very important. The other side of this is what is the speaker going to do with these bursts of power? The 100 watts of continuous power will equate to a max SPL required of around 100 dB, which will be achievable by any decent speaker. What matters is what does the speaker do with the dynamic peaks of 16 or 32 times this much power. The M80HPs and LFR880HPs will do fine with this. The M100s and LFR1100s even better. I can say from personal experience that running LFR1100s with an ADA1500-4 or 2 x ADA1500-2 will never crap out on you. Now that is a party!
