I've wondered about this for a long time. Seems to me that the new stereo's don't have the punch that the old ones did/do. I recently had my 500 watt 5 point surround sound system die during an electrical storm. Yah yah I know my fault for not unplugging it. Anyway, I have an old Technics 100 watt stereo amplifier. Damn things gotta be 20 or more years old. I put it into storage because it was cheaper to buy a new surround sound system, than it was to buy new speakers for it. So when the surround sound system died, I thought. "No problem I'll just use my old amp until I can afford a new system." I hooked two of the supposedly 100 watt speakers to my 50 watts per channel amp. Pushed maybe 7 watts into them before they were worballing horribly. Now it just so happens that I actually have 2 broken surround sound systems. One from our store and one from our home. So I took the sub woofers from both of them. And tied them to the smallest speakers (old fashion base and treble). And plugged that into my old amplifier. I have to turn the bass down a bit,and the treble all the way up to keep the speakers from freaking out. And it sound great. Better than the surround sounds ever did. But, I now have supposedly 200 watts worth of speakers attached to a 50 watt powers source. And I still can't push 20 watts into them. So I guess my question is. Is there a new way of measuring watts? Is the wattage dispersed differently? Or are we just getting fed a line of bullshit about these fancy new systems? Either way, it seems to me like we are getting shorted. Plus the ability to actually set the bass and treble separately, is much more preferred to a series of preset selections that I have never found to quite work for my tastes.
I think that they are just being misleading with the numbers, they are not giving the RMS output which is how it should be measured but the PMPO which is the peak output and maybe twice as high.