Most of the time, your amp isn’t working hard.
Even when you’re really into it—volume up, speakers cooking—you’re probably only using a watt or two. Maybe less. The average listening level in most systems hovers around 85 dB at the seat. With reasonably efficient speakers, that doesn’t take much power at all. Which means that what you’re actually hearing—what defines the character of your system—is happening in the first watt.
That’s where the magic (or the trouble) lives.
In that first watt, you’re hearing the amp’s noise floor. Its linearity. Its harmonic structure. The way it handles microdynamics, space, and transient detail. If that part isn’t right, it doesn’t matter what the amp can do at 100 watts or 500. You’ve already lost the emotional thread.
We learned this early at PS Audio, and it’s why every amp we’ve designed—especially in the BHK and now the PMG Signature series—starts with the same question: how pure is that first watt? How much information is preserved? How does it feel?
That word—feel—is important. Because it’s not just about the sound. It’s about connection. The soft impact of a piano key. The space between two bowed notes. A breath before a vocal line. Those are low-level events, often just a few milliwatts at the speaker terminals. And they’re the difference between a system that sounds good and one that moves you.
This is also why some low-powered amps—especially well-designed SETs or Class A designs—sound so magical on sensitive speakers. Not because they’re underpowered, but because everything they’re doing happens in their sweet spot. They live in that first watt. And when that watt is clean, quiet, and harmonically rich, the music just breathes.
That doesn’t mean power doesn’t matter. You want headroom. You want the amp to stay composed when the music demands scale. But if it stumbles in the quiet moments—if it adds grit or blur or haze when the signal is barely tickling the outputs—no amount of brute force will make up for it later.
So next time you’re listening, pay attention to the quiet stuff. The texture. The inner detail. The sense of space when the music pulls back. That’s the first watt doing its job—or not.
At PS Audio, that’s where we begin. Because if we don’t get that first watt right, nothing else matters.
