http://www.300guitars.com/articles/ampl ... -decibels/
jb wrote:I've been looking into tube amps recently, and I just scrolled back and saw that Bugera amp from May-- 120w. Which makes me really confused, because in reading I see that a Vox 15w will apparently blow your head off and 30w is enough to play a pretty big room. So what the fuck do you do with a 120w tube amp? And how do you keep it from catching on fire from just being so loud?
And there there is this thing: http://www.musicradar.com/reviews/guita ... 800-615917
840w per channel?!?!?!?!?!?! (and light enough to carry in a backpack) What kind of god damned speaker do you hook that thing up to and do you get a whole Michael J Fox in Back to the Future type thing happening if you do?
(Contrast this with solid-state amps, where the wattage required to be loud is a lot higher. My Princeton 112+ is 65w for example and is just enough for a small rock club and still probably needs to be mic'd.)
fluffy wrote:Do they mean watts of power draw or watts of sound power? Because sound power watts are massively loud (10W is around 130dB) but a lot of amps are crazy inefficient at converting one to the other.
AJOwens wrote:You need to think also about how the power output is measured. 10W RMS is not the same as 10W peak.
Bass amps tend to need massive power. Put a 60W RMS guitar amp and a 60W RMS bass amp on stage, and you're going to have an extremely frustrated bass player. To get a clean sound in a modest venue, a bass player would probably want 200W RMS as a minimum.