That is where I am as well. I wish we could make progress on objective side, or prove that the subjective experience is wrong. We are in a bit of limbo here.
For me, I listened to low wattage tube amplifier driving horns at CES in a massive room which I cannot replicate with my Salon 2 speakers and massive amplification. This was the system and demo:
More recent experience has been no less than three JBL speakers that left me with that impression as well.
Hi Amirm
I think there is a mechanism that could explain this conclusion / impression.
How relates top how we hear and the signal.
We are used to thinking about "level" like a VU-meter or a Sound Level Meter.
Both of these integrate the signal over some time period, with the VU meter in the days of analogue circuitry and recording tape the time integration made sense because if you went past 0dB, the level continued to increase but was only increasingly distorted. Going past 0 dB a little on peaks then was kinda ok because you can't hear even gross distortion on peaks if it is short enough.
That inability to hear "short" issues is also why you can't hear clipping if short enough.
In the old days there was a tool called an oscilloscope which would show the wave shape of a signal. This can easily reveal a problem like this.
In the early 2000's an amplifier company (QSC) went around to people in the sound business and carried an ABX switcher where you could compare amplifiers, your to theirs (which were typically lighter).
First you put in a sine wave to adjust the levels to be exactly the same and then you chose a couple tracks to listen to.
We listened on some speakers we sold and i was familiar with and my threshold stasis sounded VERY similar to the pro amps as in maybe a tiny tiny difference on a few places in only some music BUT as we turned it up a bit more there was a difference.
The Threshold still sounded essentially the same EXCEPT it sounded a bit less dynamic when going back and forth quickly with the switcher.
That seemed odd the Threshold VU indicators showed peaks of -20dB and at home I know they hit -12 occasionally on peaks.
I (eventually) grabbed an oscilloscope and looked at the amp output and I was stunned, with the tracks that were less dynamic, there was instantaneous clipping and I don't mean the terrible sound of sustained clipping, only being one or a few cycles long it was inaudible and all this did was remove some of the dynamic .
So lets say you had a speaker that had 85dB 1w1m sensitivity and you sat at 4 meters (-12dB from 1m).
Lets say you had a 50W traditional SS amplifier (in other words not class D with a magic power supply) that clips at 55 Watts. 55 Watts is +17dB over 1Watt.
So you have a maximum peak unclipped level at the chair of 85dB - 12dB (distance) and +17dB (peak of 55 Watts) or about 90 dB SPL.
If you were playing normal hifi type music say 20dB p/a at the maximum unclipped level, then with a sound level meter on slow would read about 70dB.
You can raise the measure SPL farther but the instantaneous peaks cannot exceed 70dB
This kind of underscores what the late Dick Heyser said "what we need for music is a clean 10W amplifier that can put of peaks of 1000W" (that is a p/a of 20dB).
So lets take a high efficiency horn speaker which might have a sensitivity of say 105 dB 1W1M And let say you had big triodes like those in the picture and lets pretend they are 10 Watt amplifiers. Tubes operated like that, especially if without -fb have to be run in a linear region and that means they also usually had output headroom they might be able to produce +3dB or more albeit distorted.
So the maximum peak SPL at the chair would be about 105dB 1w1m -12dB distance +13 dB peak over 1W = 106dB.
With 36 dB being about 4000 times more energy, that would be detectable even at a trade show.
The point is, unless you look with an oscilloscope you don't know if you have instantaneous clipping and if your feeling the dynamics are limited consider getting / borrowing an oscilloscope and looking at the amp output*. That point will show not only if the amp is clipping instantaneously but also anything else is in the signal path
*assuming you don't have a class d Bridged amp in which case read up on this.
The "other thing" that can create this impression is lets say you switch to a horn system that is say +10dB more sensitive than your previous speakers. With the same amplifier, you maximum unclipped level is now 10 dB greater.
If you had instantaneous clipping before, it may well be gone now and seem and actually be more dynamic as your amp is putting out 1/10 the average power to produce the same avg spl.
All this assumed there are no other non-linearity and while power compression is a longer term heat related thing, it is normally not an issue with these real short peak signals
Best Regards
Tom Danley
