My son's not using his speakers because he doesn't want to bring the receiver and such to his dorm room. So I'm thinking of getting him an Audioengine N22 so he can connect the speakers to his computer. I ran the specs through a calculator and it comes up as ~103 db, which should be enough to both make him deaf and thrown out. But specs aside, is 22w enough to run the M3s decently?

Cork, there's no "specs aside" which reasonably come into this scenario. Specs for speaker sensitivity, amplifier max power and listening distance answer the question.

Using the 88dB for 1 watt at 1 meter M3 sensitivity and using the typical in-room loss of 3dB per doubling of distance, the numbers at a reasonable distance of 2 meters in a dorm room come up as 85dB for 1 watt, 95dB for 10 watts and just over 98dB for 22 watts. This should be entirely sufficient for dorm room listening.

Thanks John; I guess I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything, including, "the Audioengine will never deliver 22 watts!" But I went ahead and ordered it.

By the way, I actually came here to consider the Axiom computer speakers, but they are "sold out". I haven't been keeping up with the forum news and gossip, are they being replaced by something else?

They have been recently discontinued in favor of developing a new line of wireless ones. There was a recent teaser in This Thread.

Oh hell! I had been thinking that if my son likes the amp setup I might get him some M2's for the computer so he can move the M3's back to his stereo. The upcoming system would have simplified the whole thing. Thanks for the link though Murph, I'll stay plugged in now.