wouldn't the amp you are using be significant overkill in both power and price for the little things?

I think you may be misunderstanding the relationship between amplifier power and speaker capacity.

Sometimes you will see speakers rated at x number of watts, like a "500 watt subwoofer" for example. That doesn't mean that you need to have a 500 watt amplifier; it means that theoretically you could put up to 500 watts of power into the speaker without damaging it. The key words here are "up to". Just because you have a 500 watt amplifier doesn't mean that you have to drive 500 watts out of it.

You could connect a 10,000 watt amplifier to your stock speakers and they would be just fine, as long as you held the gain on the amplifier down to a listenable level. In the above (absurd) example, your amplifier gain would be set to pretty near zero. But within reason, more power means better sound. It's better to have a 500 watt amplifier running at 20% of its maximum capacity than a 100 watt amplifier running at 100%. You'll have less distortion, cleaner attacks, quicker transients, less heat, more reliability.

In fact, you are just as likely (maybe even more likley) to damage speakers by using an underpowered amplifier than by having one too powerful. The underpowered amplifier trying to drive large or multiple speakers will be stressed to the point of clipping the signal into square waves, which is highly detrimental to speaker longevity.

Amplifiers seem to be one of those commodities in which you get what you pay for. Expensive amplifiers generally sound better than cheap amplifiers of the same power rating. You can buy amplifiers from about $99 on up to about 20 times that price. The amplifier that is going into my new competition car just about splits the difference there, and is rated at just 300 watts.

tanstaafl.



"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"