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Old 07-01-2020, 02:08 AM   #9
Softsynth
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Jun 2015
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Hard clipping sounds ugly but oddly enough gently distorted signals are your ears friends. The human ear perceives distortion as loudness. This is why weedy ghetto blasters seem annoyingly loud in close quarters with just a few watts, and in reality aren't playing all that loud. In contrast large and genuinely high quality monitors and Hi-fi systems can play loud and sound clean, so you need to be wary of playback levels. This applies even more to quality headphones as the diaphragms barely have to move to produce sound and are incredibly well controlled thus produce very little distortion.

This distortion is also why we perceive more bass from small speakers. Clean bass from big systems in large listening rooms (and the best high-end headphones) is qualitatively superior so you have to be even more wary the better your system gets.

The OP should get a power measuring wall plug with LCD to see how much power he is really using at typical listening levels.
Most music we listen to typically happens in the first watt, but of course speaker systems are less efficient than that.

Last edited by Softsynth; 07-01-2020 at 02:56 AM. Reason: Smartphone typos..
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