I wonder if anyone is going to get around to seeing the relationship between the output of a "5 watt amp" compared to a "1 watt amp".
 
 
 
 
This seems to be the direction of thinking being pursued by the person who posted the web info that I linked to in the OP.

mike_mccue
How do you feel about this?:
 
2^log10(P2/P1) * 100%

All I know is 2880.26 goes to 11.
 

 
All I know is that I'm going to be looking for MY Camelopardalis tonight.
 

mike_mccue
 
I wonder if anyone is going to get around to seeing the relationship between the output of a "5 watt amp" compared to a "1 watt amp".
 
 
 
 
This seems to be the direction of thinking being pursued by the person who posted the web info that I linked to in the OP.

Well it seems that he is saying five watts is too much for "real bedroom" volume. And so is one watt he seems to believe.

Then he talks about going further down in orders of magnitude on down to milliamp wattage.

I was trying to think of what kind of speaker would you use in such a amp. Thin cone material with small voice coil? Reminded me of a tweeter.

Not really understanding this quest for true bedroom volume.

"Bedroom" volume is useful in any dwelling which is attached to neighbours for a start.
 
Through the same speaker a 5 watt amp is only about half the volume of a 50 watt - still ***** loud in domestic circumstances and getting power amp overdrive isn't really possible.
 
Hence sub 1 watt amplifiers. Some of which (e.g. Blackheart and Blackstar) sound pretty good, partly because you can get the power side of the amp overdriving rather than just the preamp. As for the speaker, use a standard guitar speaker, preferably a pretty inefficient one. Even then they can be pretty loud cranked. I've measured my Blackheart (claimed 1 watt, in reality more like a quarter to a half watt) into a 10" Celestion Greenback at 95dbA at one meter and it wasn't turned up fully.
 
The low-power amps have the added benefit that you can get the "cranked" sound without deafening yourself.

I have a little Vox AC4TV mini.
 
It's a 4 watt (1 EL84) amp but switchable down to either 1 watt or .1 watt. Single volume and a tone control that doesn't really do anything (so I leave it turned all the way up). It has a little speaker, but I like to plug it into an external cab.
 
At 4 watts it's LOUD and clean and yes I've plugged it into my Marshall 4x12 1960A and it has no problem there.
 
At 1 watt you can get some distortion if you turn it up enough, but not quite at what I'd consider a bedroom volume.
 
At .1 watt you can turn it up enough to play the blues at 2 AM or while watching TV. Through a standard 12" guitar speaker with 80 watts power handling.
 
And all things being equal, a 100 watt head would be +18dB louder than the .1 watts.

It doesn't matter. As long as it's turned up to eleven it'll be louder.  Nigel taught me that.

Gentlemen, I understand what someone who wants "bedroom" volume is after. Isn't it much easier to put on headphones?

Here's my reasoning: If your going to use a milliwatt amp through a 8" - 12" speaker, you still moving a good amount of air. 95db spl is pretty darn loud!

I have lived in apartments and understand the situation. That's when I got my first amp SIM and some headphones.

Was that a compromise? Yes it was. The pursuit of "bedroom" volume is a fantasy. There is no such thing! 😊

However, if your pursuit is tone and not "bedroom" volume, everything I just said does not apply. And for the pursuit of tone I am interested in these milliwatt amps.

Wondering what type of tubes they use? Are these tubes still being made? Hand wired? I'll have to look into this. My curiosity is up.

 
 
The best I can figure, a 1 watt amp is something like 62% as loud as a 5 watt amp.
 
When one considers the nature of the Flecther Munson curves at low SPL, it seems like running a 5 watt amp with a wicked "mid scoop" might be more satisfying that running a 1 watt amp and wishing you had 38% more low end.
 
Or something like that.

Grem
Gentlemen, I understand what someone who wants "bedroom" volume is after. Isn't it much easier to put on headphones?

Here's my reasoning: If your going to use a milliwatt amp through a 8" - 12" speaker, you still moving a good amount of air. 95db spl is pretty darn loud!

I have lived in apartments and understand the situation. That's when I got my first amp SIM and some headphones.

Was that a compromise? Yes it was. The pursuit of "bedroom" volume is a fantasy. There is no such thing! 😊

It's no different than playing your stereo or TV at low volume. Do people switch to different amps or speakers when they want quiet listening? No. They just turn down the volume and it gets quieter. There used to be "loudness" switches on stereos to supposedly compensate for changes in our hearing's equal loudness contours at low listening levels by boosting high and low frequencies, but that was really imperfect (it's very hard to do that job properly) and often misunderstood (and left on all the time) and it seems to have fallen out of popularity.
 
The only difference with guitar amps is if you want actual power tube distortion at low volume, you either need to make things real inefficient (various types of attenuators that mostly turn power into heat) or reduce the output power of the amp (various types of scaling the tube behavior or very low power tubes). Or both.
 
Speaker breakup is just not practical at low volumes.
 
 
But I think the point of this thread is that many people have very little clue how little actual power an amp puts out to achieve a pretty significant volume. So if you want actual power tube distortion at bedroom volumes, you're really talking about < 1 watt or using an attenuator of some type.
 
In general our intuition seems just terribly badly equipped to deal with any logarithmic/exponential behavior in our world.