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How much power will your new speakers need? That ultimately depends
on your listening environment and musical tastes. As little as five watts per
channel should drive them to a level satisfactory for background music. A
typical 45 watt per channel receiver may fill a room with the compressed
mid-band energy of “heavy metal,” but seem to lack weight or control with
classical recordings. Some audiophiles feel that 200 watts per channel is
the bare minimum to avoid audible clipping distortion when reproducing
music at “live” playback levels. Your Legacy speakers are designed to
take advantage of “high-powered” amplifiers, so don’t be afraid to put
them through their paces.
How much is too much power? Rarely is a drive unit damaged by large
doses of music power. More often than not the villain is amplifier clipping
distortion. Even through decades of refinement, loudspeakers are still
notoriously inefficient transducers, requiring huge amounts of power to
recreate the impact of the live performance. Typically less that 1% of
electrical power is converted into acoustic output. (For example, an omni-
directional transducer with an anechoic sensitivity of 90 dB @ 1w/1m has
a full space efficiency of only 0.63%)
