If you consider yourself a true music lover and you always want to enjoy the sound at the highest possible level, it is essential that you buy the right playing equipment for yourself. Nowadays, there is a huge choice of such things on the market, so you have to take the time to check what will be best for us. It is enough to take a look at any model of a playing column to see that such equipment is described with the use of various technical parameters - fortunately you do not need to be a specialist in this field in order to be able to recognise the most important of them and on their basis to read which model will meet our expectations.
The most basic parameter you can encounter with such equipment is power. These huge columns can have a power of up to 1000 W, and they don't cost that much. However, one should consider carefully whether high power is actually such a marker of good equipment, and whether by any chance such displaying it in advertisements is not an ordinary marketing trick. So it will be good to read this parameter more closely to know what it actually means and what features the column decides about.
A lot of people who are a little less familiar with this subject clearly identify the power of the speaker with their loudness. However, this is not true, because power affects many other features of the equipment. Moreover, it should not be assumed in advance that louder - means better. Not everything here revolves around the volume, so when buying a loudspeaker, you shouldn't just use power. Nevertheless, it is a very important parameter, but for many other reasons, which some of us will not even think about.
Let's start with the fact that the vast majority of loudspeakers used in ordinary houses are passive - this means that they do not have a built-in amplifier, and all the power that reaches them is generated by external devices. Generally speaking, they are then responsible for converting electrical energy into mechanical, or sound. Interestingly, in most models, only about 1% of the energy that reaches the speaker is converted directly into sound, while the rest is converted into heat energy. It is therefore necessary to choose appropriate speakers to match the power of the amplifier itself, as its excess may lead to serious damage to the equipment in the long run.
The power given for each model of the speaker therefore means how much power it is able to absorb from the external amplifier. Many manufacturers even focus more on the power range of the amplifier recommended for a given speaker than on the power of the speaker itself. This is by far the most important thing we should pay attention to when looking at the power of the column.
Since power is not the only indicator of whether we will be satisfied with a given column, what parameters should we follow here? A very important feature is the column efficiency, which is also given in the specifications of the individual models. In short, this parameter determines how much sound the column is able to produce at a distance of one meter and at 1 W. This is a parameter that determines the volume of a given column much more precisely than the power itself. The effectiveness of the column is not influenced by its power, but by its construction and the materials used in it. In general, the lighter its individual elements are, the more effective it is. However, this makes the manufacturers of such equipment very often have quite a difficult task, as it is difficult to combine lightweight elements ensuring high efficiency with a speaker design that would be able to take on more power from the amplifier.
Of course, the efficiency of the loudspeaker also tells us how important it is to position such equipment properly in the room where we intend to listen to music. The effectiveness decreases with every meter - the basic parameter counts at a distance of 1 m, but usually the columns are positioned slightly further away from where you sit. If we want a truly impeccable sound quality, we need to plan the whole room in which we will listen to the music in advance and set up our playing equipment correctly.
When looking at the power of a given column, we must also remember that manufacturers usually specify different types of power in their product specifications. For the average user, the most important thing is the rated power, or RMS. Other parameters do not affect the quality of the sound we listen to so significantly, but manufacturers often give them, because the value of power measured differently than the rated one may be higher. As we said at the beginning, many customers are blindly guided here by power and buy the equipment that can offer the most - so this is a good marketing trick for manufacturers.
As you can see, there are many parameters we have to pay attention to when choosing a column for ourselves. It is simply worth remembering that power is not the most important of them - blindly following it and choosing a column with the highest power does not lead to anything.
