I had a talk once with a couple of engineers at McIntosh. Well, it
wasn't _at_ the Binghamton plant, it was on what would be Dave
O'Brien's final tech tour and a couple of engineers accompanied him to
several of the better retailers at which he ran his Clinic. This was at
a shop owned by a guy who was probably the biggest prick I've ever
met in the hi-fi business. There was a small demo room in back where a
big McIntosh amp-this was before the 1-KW monoblock, but it was then
the biggest they made-was connected to a pair of Klipschhorns. The room
was about half as wide and long as would be suited for K-horns anyway,
and it was a bone of minor contention, I detected, why he didn't have
large Mac speakers there rather than Klipsches. Anyway I got to talking
to these engineers-they had nametags, it wasn't any of the big guns
like Nestorovic, Rimo, Corderman or fish, I would have remembered
those-and i asked them in that room, If I had a room like this size and
the discussed big Mac speakers and I wanted to use regular amps with no
Power Guard (essentially an internal limiter/compressor) and be assured
of never clipping or "running out of current", how big of an amp I
would need.

They himmed and hawed a little but looked the room over and eventually
allowed that, as long as we were talking about music reproduction, and
not including the 1812 Overture, about 3500 watts per channel would do
nicely.

I realized then and there we were talking about a dead end concept and
the efficient speaker and small "good first watt" amplifier was the
only really valid concept for quality reproduction.