<A lot of Taiwanese jive, is what it boils down to. After playing around wi <a pair of "200W" speakers today, I'd estimate about 2.5W RMS per channel. < <> I don't own any such speakers, or indeed, a soundcard. Never seen the nee <for > > one... For laughs I took a pair of the so called 60W per speakers, opened them and put them on a 50w dummyload and measured them. They did 12W RMS at less than .1% distortion, at 13W they were already to 1% and at 14W 5%. The 60w number, power drawn from the wall outlet at full load! haveing spent years in audio and analoge if the claim is power the PSU better be BIG or its all smoke and mirrors. <> What I am asking for is _any_ kind of justification for the modern kind <> of watt... it's still the same here. A Watt or power will produce a certain amount of heat (RMS). However a non sinusoidal waveform will still drive a load to the same peak current and voltage but the power (heating ability) will be greatly lowered or increased. the hardest driving waveform is a symetric squarewave. the lowest would be a for example a 1% asymetric pulse. <The modern watts sell speakers. Our customers like to hear "big numbers," <and don't have a clue as to what those numbers mean or how to verify them, <whether it's in reference to watts, MHz, bps, RAM, cache, or disk storage. <The box says 200 watts, and people like the look of them. It's mostly bull, there are some testing situations for audio where continious power (due to PSU or cooling limitations) will be lower than peak power (short bursts). This is legit and meaningful for audio as it does have a high peak to average power. However physics say... if the PSU can supply 12V at 2A there is a finite limit there and it's 24W and how you apply that to a 4 or 8ohm speaker is still only going to yeild 24W (or less) as we still cannot create power that doesn't exist. My history includes designing 500W (RMS continous) per channel amplifers and audio consoles back in the dark ages. Allison