How loud are speakers supposed to play?

You have a stereo receiver with amp built in powering your speakers, and allegedly they could handle twice the power you’re currently giving them just fine.

I recently got a Marantz receiver and a pair of tower speakers as well, and I’ve not put it past 60 on the volume. 30-40 is a comfortable background audio level for conversations, 45 you gotta talk a bit louder, 50 and 55 you can hear it easily from outside the apt. The one time I had Nina Simone singing feeling good at 60, I could not hear my partner talking to me in the other, and then she yelled at me to turn it down!

Needless to say, your speakers would probably give you serious hearing damage before you reached the point of damaging the speakers. Enjoy your high quality audio, friend :)

RMS means ‘root mean square’ it’s a type of averaging.

If you took a continuous power measurement over time and took the square of every measurement, average them together and get the square root of the average the result that’s this measure is. Audio is an AC signal, so at any given time the wattage varies. Watts RMS is a way to express this variation with a single number.

Your amplifier is capable of delivering 100W - that’s 100W all at once. Like if you fed it a DC signal and turned up the volume all the way and measured it across an 4-ohm resistor, you should see 100W passing through that load (DO NOT DO THIS).

So, no. Even if you delivered a 100w spike of current to your speaker it wouldn’t have harmed anything. In theory you could play your speakers at 100% all the time seven days a week and they’d be fine, because the RMS wattage your speaker is seeing way less than that.

Even if your speakers saw 100W RMS, you wouldn’t be close to to rated power handling of the speaker.

So yeah, it’s going to be loud, that’s because these speakers are capable of producing 89dB per watt at 1 meter - so you can imagine what throwing 60W is going to sound like!

But did you damage your speakers? Absolutely not. They over-engineer these speakers to handle anything you throw at them.

‘Blowing speakers’ was really more of an issue with cheap 80s department store fartblasters that were designed to be as loud and as cheap as possible. As a result small coils on giant 12 or 15” drivers using cheap materials and adhesives were used and so after several months at playing near the speaker’s power handling they’d fail.

One day a Gen X teenager would crank the volume and they’d blow out, either mechanically or thermally and they’d brag about how that one time ‘they blew the speaker’; in reality it was the cumulative effect of months of abuse.

(Speakers can, ofcourse, catastrophically fail, too but this is unlikely, especially with the component systems popular in the 80s)

If you look at the specs for your speakers, their "sensitivity" is 89dB. It means that with 1W of amplification, from a listening distance of 1m, you will get 89dB.

89dB is fucking loud. For reference, 85dB is the point where exposure causes permanent hearing damage. And you have the amplification power to go WAY louder. Each time you double the amplification W you gain 3 dB in volume. eg 1W = 89dB, 2W = 92dB, 4W = 95dB

Plus, as these are well constructed speakers with large woofers, they will happily crank out higher volumes without breaking sweat. You could play music well into >100db and the only thing you'll damage is your ears.

Have fun