One thing I didn't get into that plays a role here...
A typical Celestion 12" guitar speaker will put out around 100 decibels at ONE watt using a 1KHz sine wave. You can get very loud indeed with a ONE watt amp. So why the extra power?
The answer is that the waveforms that come out of your guitar, playing a chord, or even a note, are far more complex than a 1KHz sine wave, the impedance of the speaker varies with frequency, your playing dynamics come into play, and there are lots and lots of other factors that affect what the amp needs to put out to drive the speaker.
People who are into hi fi know that if they have a 200 watt power amplifier driving their speakers, they'll get a cleaner, more powerful sound during complex peak passages, all things being equal, than if they have a 100 watt power amplifier at the same volume levels. This doesn't mean they have to play their system any louder than they would if they ran 100 watts. It just means there's additional headroom.
The powered monitors in my studio (Event Opals) each have a built-in 270 watt amplifier for the woofer, and a 50 watt amplifier for the tweeter. That doesn't mean I run them one decibel louder than I did my last pair of Genelec monitors with 90 watts built into the speaker for each driver. The speakers are about the same size, by the way. I don't run them louder at all, and in fact, I check the output levels with a decibel meter to make sure I'm monitoring at OSHA-safe levels.
However, they sound clearer and have more detail, and one reason is that they have more headroom. I don't have to run them louder to have the benefit of the additional wattage.
This is the same with a guitar amp, as far as I'm concerned. I don't necessarily have to run them louder to hear what the additional wattage does.
This isn't to say that a low power amplifier can't be a very cool thing indeed. We all know that Clapton cut Layla with a Tweed Champ, and the Beano album with an 18 Watt Marshall. We all know that Page cut "Dazed and Confused" with what most folks presume to have been a Supro Model 24 with 18 watts (Page himself isn't sure which model he used and no one seems to have 100% info on it).
But Page has also stated in interviews that he mostly used his famous 100 Watt Marshalls or Hiwatts in the studio, and it's known that he used a 100 or 200 Watt Rickenbacker Transonic solid state amp on "Heartbreaker." So...there are a lot of myths about how often he actually went with the low-power stuff, no doubt some of them conjured up by Page himself to protect his secret sauce!
The point of this little excursion is simply to say that there are lots of ways to skin a cat, and some of the info "everyone knows" isn't necessarily true.
A typical Celestion 12" guitar speaker will put out around 100 decibels at ONE watt using a 1KHz sine wave. You can get very loud indeed with a ONE watt amp. So why the extra power?
The answer is that the waveforms that come out of your guitar, playing a chord, or even a note, are far more complex than a 1KHz sine wave, the impedance of the speaker varies with frequency, your playing dynamics come into play, and there are lots and lots of other factors that affect what the amp needs to put out to drive the speaker.
People who are into hi fi know that if they have a 200 watt power amplifier driving their speakers, they'll get a cleaner, more powerful sound during complex peak passages, all things being equal, than if they have a 100 watt power amplifier at the same volume levels. This doesn't mean they have to play their system any louder than they would if they ran 100 watts. It just means there's additional headroom.
The powered monitors in my studio (Event Opals) each have a built-in 270 watt amplifier for the woofer, and a 50 watt amplifier for the tweeter. That doesn't mean I run them one decibel louder than I did my last pair of Genelec monitors with 90 watts built into the speaker for each driver. The speakers are about the same size, by the way. I don't run them louder at all, and in fact, I check the output levels with a decibel meter to make sure I'm monitoring at OSHA-safe levels.
However, they sound clearer and have more detail, and one reason is that they have more headroom. I don't have to run them louder to have the benefit of the additional wattage.
This is the same with a guitar amp, as far as I'm concerned. I don't necessarily have to run them louder to hear what the additional wattage does.
This isn't to say that a low power amplifier can't be a very cool thing indeed. We all know that Clapton cut Layla with a Tweed Champ, and the Beano album with an 18 Watt Marshall. We all know that Page cut "Dazed and Confused" with what most folks presume to have been a Supro Model 24 with 18 watts (Page himself isn't sure which model he used and no one seems to have 100% info on it).
But Page has also stated in interviews that he mostly used his famous 100 Watt Marshalls or Hiwatts in the studio, and it's known that he used a 100 or 200 Watt Rickenbacker Transonic solid state amp on "Heartbreaker." So...there are a lot of myths about how often he actually went with the low-power stuff, no doubt some of them conjured up by Page himself to protect his secret sauce!
The point of this little excursion is simply to say that there are lots of ways to skin a cat, and some of the info "everyone knows" isn't necessarily true.