Most of you are familiar with me by now. I'm a 'bit of a geek'. I know stuff about electromoronics & electrickery & am a bit of a dab hand at fixing stuff.

BUT.. !

I'm still having a hard time understanding amplifier & active speaker specs - or more to the point I'm puzzled by what seems to be going on in the world of speaker specs. Manufacturers lie.. er I mean bend the truth (that's called MARKETING, deary) - I've known this for ages but by how much, and why precisely? Not that it really matters a jot but I'm interested in knowing what the real power output is. You know. Just because.

It was Yamaha who first piqued my interest when I was perusing their spec sheets. An active speaker which apparently (on paper) goes very loud (oo - and recently confirmed when I heard them in person) with "1300 watts". Ah yes but look at the figure for power consumption - as in what it pulls from the wall. ONE HUNDRED WATTS. Hmmm.

The speaker in question was a DSR115A. I didn't happen to like the sound much, FWIW but that aside.. I found a this video in which John Young of the Disc Jockey News hoof said speaker to limiting point while measuring the power it pulled from the wall with a Kill-A-Watt meter (plugin power meter). It peaked around 100 Watts.

Yes yes yes, I know full well that power is meaningless in these terms. It's really all about how loud it is (ie is it man enough for the job at hand) and what it sounds like. I know. But it's been bugging me that specs seem to be so far out of kilter with real world figures.

A comment on the above video asks "so where did the other 1200Watts go, John?", to which he replies something like "it's a different kind of watts". Hmmm. Not a good answer IMHO. OH yes! Their made up watts vs real world watts you mean? Ahhh..

At a group speaker test night a while back I'd intended to measure the power drawn from the mains so we could compare them but I couldn't find my meter in time for the event.

Intriguing, don't you think?