Think in a day or two I'm going to start a discussion on evaluating receiver specs and how to read them with an eye on real world performance. I've made attempts at this before but I'm still refining how to do it. Anyway ... just need to find some time to write up the first post ...
That would be an awesome post. My limited understanding is that an 11.1 or 5.1 channel receiver that's rated for 80W/ch, 2 channels driven, only has 160W of total power to split between 11 or 5 channels simultaneously. That was something I didn't know when I bought my AVR last year. But as someone who's probably never used more than 1W/ch ever, it probably doesn't matter in my use case.
Some of my fondest memories were at my uncle's house, with his McIntosh amps driving his McIntosh loudspeakers to ear bleeding levels...and the needles never moving beyond 5W.
