GuitarBizarre

The wattage on a speaker isn't an indication of loudness. It is a rating of how much power you can safely feed into those speakers for an extended period of time before you blow them up. The specification that a speaker needs to be judged on is impedance and sensitivity. Sensitivity is measured in Db and as a baseline, 85 is very low and hard to get volume out of, and the higher you go, the easier it is to drive a speaker. Impedance should also be looked at. Ideally, the higher the impedance, the easier a speaker is to drive and the easier time an amp will have.

The wattage on an amp DOES have some indication of volume, in as much as it determines how much power it puts out, but there are several different systems of measuring this. The one you should be concerned with is Watts RMS, which is a measure of the amount of power an amp can continuously supply without overheating or blowing up.

There is also a measure called watts PMPO. This specification is useless, since it refers to the ABSOLUTE MAXIMUM amount of power an amp can supply for any amount of time (IE less than a millisecond) before it blows up. This figure is often in excess of 4 times the RMS rating, and should never be used as a guideline.



Ideally for volume, you want high sensitivity speakers, with a high impedance, coupled with an amp capable of producing a good amount of RMS wattage. 2 ohms is low impedance, 16 is high. Coupling speakers in parallel (2 sets of speakers sharing one set of terminals for example) reduces impedance by half, so avoid doing it, you can blow amps doing that.


Post the models and specifications of the equipment you are using for us (I.E. direct links to the product pages of the manufacturers.), and we may be able to help specifically.

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