Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Value Reciever for Amps

"Compressing" (dynamic compression) in this context means that the increase in sound level stops increasing at the same** rate as power level, generally because the drivers are starting to approach mechanical limits.

Nobody is disagreeing with your statement that you need more power; the question is how much more power you need and whether just adding power will be sufficient.

You are trying to fill 6x the room size so needing to go up 12dB is not a surprise (although it seems a bit higher than I would have expected). Unfortunately 12dB translates into ~16x the power requirement. You probably won't need 16x as much power as you have today because you probably weren't at the limits of your current receiver in the old room, but by the same token there's a good risk that 2x the power will not be enough either.

Bigger speakers tend to help with SPL requirements in two ways - one is power handling ability, and the other is efficiency (more SPL for same power).

That said, doubling the power will definitely make a noticeable difference, and you'll probably get an additional improvement from the pattern (I don't want to say fact) that high end receivers & amps tend to have more headroom above their power rating than lower powered units do.

What frequency are you crossing over to the subs at ? I'm asking because you might have an opportunity to get a bit more out of your system by bumping the crossover frequency up a bit, depending on where it is now. That would not make the system any louder for a given volume setting, but might let you turn the volume up a bit further before hitting amp or speaker limits.