Their PerformaBe and Performa3 speakers have recommended amplifier power. Based on those recommendations the PerformaBe speakers should be able to hit 115dB, which is where they need to be for home theater.
The problem is there is absolutely no clarification from Revel (perhaps intentionally) about what their “recommended amplifier power“ actually means, how it was derived, or how it relates (if at all) to the speaker’s abilities. Rather we are left to make our own dangerous assumptions when trying to estimate the speaker’s capabilities, in a domain where faulty assumptions can be catastrophic.
Sure, we can calculate the estimated in-room SPL at 300 watts, but they didn’t say they could sustain 300 watts safely. And 300 watts at what frequency, 30hz? 100hz? 1000hz? 10khz?
Given how vague the specs are on what “recommended amplifier power” means, I don’t know that any of us can really understand the safe SPL range of these without more data.
In contrast, Neumann and Genelec has data available for what SPL the speakers will safely and sustainably achieve at each frequency. Here is an example of the Genelec 8361A:
Here we can see it can achieves at 1 meter anechoic >120db at 300hz, ~114db at 80hz, and ~105db at 30hz, with <10% distortion.
Is this speaker therefore capable of 120db, or 105db? Well, both, obviously, depending on the frequency. There are many ways we can try to boil this down into one number, but any such simplification is bound to lose information versus a full plot like this.
Even so, it is completely fine to boil down a multidimensional measurement like this to just a single SPL “summary” rating value; but, for this to be meaningful at all, the “summary” rating’s definition/derivation must be unambiguously specified in a 100% reproducible, standardizable way.
In Revel’s case, it really can’t get any worse or more hand-wavy with terms like “recommended amplifier power” which really (probably intentionally for liability?) makes almost no promises about actual SPL capabilities. Not that Revel is worse than most other audiophile speaker brands in this respect, but they’re certainly not better.
And we know they can do better, if they wanted to, to compete with Genelec, Neumann, etc. They probably don’t bother because they don’t see Genelec/Neumann as competitors (pro audio vs home audio), but thanks in part to ASR, I think a lot more audiophiles are seeing the merits and advantages of some pro audio products over the vague and nebulously specified fashion products the audiophile speakers world is notorious for.