Tvad, well maybe and maybe not on that 200 watt amp. I'll admit that I probably overgeneralized in my last post, and that many exceptions exist. And to a certain extent it depends on how happy the amp is with the load the speakers present, and solid state amps tend to be happier with difficult loads.
Also, the short-term power available for transients often exceeds the rated power by a considerable margin.
And from what I've been told by amplifier manufacturers (and supported by my own experience) there are different ways to arrive at the rated power figure - some optimistic, and some conservative. If that's 200 watts per channel reproducing broadband pink noise with both channels driven, it's an extremely powerful amplifier. If that's 200 watts per channel reproducing a sine wave a 1 kHz, that's not nearly as impressive and real-world it will probably clip long before the other amp.
Just as a matter of interesting trivia, FTC rules require stereo amplifier to be rated with both channels driven. But those same rules do not apply ot home theater amplifiers - the other channels only have to be on, not driven to the same power levels. This often results in highly inflated power specifications for home theater amps. Let me illustrate:
You walk into Bust Buy and there's the dimunitive Zony X-1,000,00 home theater system on sale for $299, featuring an 800 watt 7-channel amplifier. They achieve this amazing engineering feat by skimping on the power supply. You see, they only have to run one channel up to 115 watts with a 1 kHz sine wave, with the other channels barely on. They are then permitted to multiply that 115 watts by the number of channels to arrive at their rated power. And never mind that a 1 kHz sine wave is much easier to reproduce than a broadband music signal, and that the actual broadband power output before clipping may be as little as 1/8 that figure (this based on in-house testing described to me by an amplifier manufacturer).
As an extreme exammple, a decent 10 watt per channel tube amp could conceivably play louder than the "800 watt" home theater amp before audible distortion sets in.
The point of that tangent was just to illustrate one of the ways that the published specs often don't tell the whole story when it comes to amplification. It's not that measurements are inherently untrustworthy, it's that inadequate measurements provide inadequte (and often misleading) information.
Duke
