Steve Deckert
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Hi Ellsworth,
Saw your post an wanted to say first of all welcome. And to thank you for posting perhaps the perfect question relating to tube amplifiers!
In the world of watts all things are not actually equal as they should be. It's not only the difference between solid state watts and tube watts but the difference in a particular amplifiers ability to drive a complex load and finding a cheap 2 watt amp to see if it's enough power would be a disservice since the results are so tilted to be inferior to a 2 watt Zen amp. It's about the amplifiers ability to drive a difficult and variable impedance (loudspeaker) and the Zen does this better than most. So if you were to buy the inexpensive amp to hear what 2 watts is like you might well perceive a Zen at 7 or 8 watts .
In fact, I remember the last time I measured the power of a Zen it was considerably more into a speaker than it was into a dummy load ( 8 ohm resistor) which is the standard for measuring power. I seem to remember that RMS into an 8 ohm resistor being about 2 watts whereas peek power into a 7 ohm planar magnetic loudspeaker was 14 watts.
I wrote an article about "usable power" in the articles section that dovetails into this discussion and would be well worth a read to anyone interested.
My recommendation is this.... save some money, get the Zen 2 watt from the get go, and then call me if you don't think it gets loud enough or has enough punch, and we'll have a common point of reference to determine if the next size up will be fully satisfying or just a step in the right direction. Assuming after our conversation that I recommend the next step up, we would then build it for you and let you continue to enjoy the 2 watt amp until the new one is finished. Then we would simply charge the difference less shipping between the two amp amps and of course wave the restock fees.
My guess is that you would be pretty happy with 2 watts on those speakers. I lived with 90dB speakers on the same 2 watt amp for almost 4 years before I decided I needed more volume. It took that long because that amp was so good you just didn't care if it got super loud or not. It had better dynamics at lower volumes than any high power amp so you begin to realize its not about power, it's about the kind of power.... usable power, that matters.
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