Exactly! The bigger the speakers, the less power it takes to ‘drive’ them.

I didn’t think it was as simple as that?

I understood that it was down to the impedance i.e. the resistance of the speakers.

8ohm speakers offer higher resistance than 4ohm speakers, so “pull” less current from the amp. 4ohm speakers will “pull” more current and can potentially damage a weaker amp.

I am no tech expert though!

Yup – size of speaker means nothing regarding how much power is needed to drive them. You need to take into the sensitivity of the speakers amongst other things.

I would doubt it’s worth it but you are going about this wrong.

You should get out and have a listen to what is available. Make your own mind up on if you think it’s worth changing or not. Sleep on it, don’t decide there and then in the shop.

Listening to views here will only cloud your judgement and make it harder to decide for yourself.

I’m just looking at getting a technics CD player with a set of mackie active studio monitors.
The sound is fantastic on a colleagues setup

i have one of the earlier ‘compact’ denon systems, which are sort of like miniature separates, but designed to work together. so if you hit play on the cd then the pre-amp, PA and cd player fire up, but it leaves the tape deck ( yeah, yeah ) off. sounds great, and still does, but lives in the garage now, as the cd player died. from there i spent a similar amount of money on a linn classik and a pair of B&W speakers. sounds awesome, however it has ‘issues’ now, and linn have rather unhelpfully decided they no longer support such old units. 🙄
when this finally dies it will likely be an arcam solo unit for me. it was a toss-up between one of those and the linn when i bought that, and the functions they’ve built in to them now are amazing.

Dab is rubbish

doesn’t have to be – it depends on the playback device, etc.

I listen to MP2s recorded from DAB all day from a Cowon i10 player and Shure se535 headphones and it sounds pretty good, and my old Videologic radio (Pure before they changed their name) can sound pretty decent.

Don’t forget that BBC VHF radio 3 transmissions, which people used to praise, are transmitted over a 15bit network, so they aren’t CD quality either.

I didn’t think it was as simple as that?
I understood that it was down to the impedance i.e. the resistance of the speakers.
8ohm speakers offer higher resistance than 4ohm speakers, so “pull” less current from the amp. 4ohm speakers will “pull” more current and can potentially damage a weaker amp.
I am no tech expert though!

The impedance is (mostly) just the electrical behaviour of the speaker. What matters most is the acoustic behaviour of the speaker. The sensitivity number you see quoted is a simplified (and marketing tweaked 😉 ) statement of that. I’d guess that my home hi-fi speakers are around 88dB sensitivity. One of the biggest loudspeakers we make at work is 100dB sensitivity. That means with 1W input you get that many dB SPL out. If you double the power input you get another 3dB out, so to make the hi-fi speaker reach 100dB you’ll need 2^4=16W into it.

Very few small hi-fi speakers can handle 16W in the lows without becoming somewhat non-linear (various distortion mechanisms). My 50W hi-fi amp can probably push this pair of speakers with 5″ woofers to about 103dB at best. Meanwhile stick a pair of pro-audio speakers with 2×12″ woofers on that same amp and they’ll hit 103dB with 2W and the amp will run out of power at 115dB, comfortably twice as loud (10dB = doubling of loudness).

The joy of very very big hi-fi speakers is that they need so little power to drive them that you can vastly reduce lots of the distortion mechanisms inherent to sound reproduction – if speakers are equally well designed and equally expensive then the bigger they are, the more real they tend to sound.

Who is it you work for CGG?

A few differences in opinions to be expected but I do want something smaller/easy to use so will go and look and try some of the Denon/Marantz units coupled to decent speakers or one of those sound box things recommended. We have the usual high street places around here plus a Richer Sounds and a specialist hi-fi place to check out but considering my hearing isn’t that good anyway, I imagine I won’t be able tell a huge amount of difference in quality for some.
Surprised by DAB comments, I do like it for 6 Music, 5 live, radio 4 etc on kitchen/van/shed radios but I do also listen to stuff on line at work like ‘music machine 2’ which seems pretty good.

I have a Denon M39 with a pair of Dali Zensor 1s, pop in to a dealer and check out what they can do for your budget/have a listen,you may be surprised,don’t rush.

trip to Richers at weekend to listen they have the denon M39 and marantz 610 with speaker package deals, the dali zensors or Q acoustics 2020i which all seem to get really good reviews

Be careful going to Richer Sounds – unless they can demonstrate in a quiet room then anything they demonstrate will probably be run at a higher volume than you are likely to use at home because the shop background noise will be higher than at home – and everything normally sounds better at higher volume.

Check if you can have a cooling off period in case you make a mistake – sometimes they do that with their extended warranty thing.

well I got the Denon one with Dali speakers from Richer Sounds at the weekend for £289 package deal, they did a tenner off for signing up on line for the newsletter and chucked in some decent cables. It sounds really great on DAB and off iphone/pad but not so good for cd’s for some reason. I had to get a better DAB aerial off ebay as the piece of thin wire supplied was crap, fine now. And, my old system is still in the family, so everyone happy. Thanks for tips.

I have a Denon RCD-M38 with Mission MX1 Speakers in my office at work.

I haven’t regretted it I’m sure you will enjoy yours.