DaneelOlivaw
300 Club - QQ All-Star
Same here. When my system was first set up, it was in a carpeted living room measuring 16' x 19' with an 8' ceiling and large openings on both sides. Along with the sub, there were four speakers with 8" woofers used as satellites and all with 91dB SPL efficiency ratings. The sats were powered by a $400/26lb Technics SA-DA8 receiver with the typical over-optimistic "100 watt x 5" rating.I use a mid priced HT receiver for all my quadraphonic (as well as SACD, DVD-A, dtsCD) listening and find that it plays as loud as I have ever wanted it to play.
Even using a really low-efficiency Realistic Minimus 77 (IIRC 84dB) as a center channel for experimentation pursposes (I normally run the receiver in phantom center mode), I never turned that mechanical volume knob past the 11:00 position for any movie or surround title, unless it was for immature demo purposes. FYI: at that position the resulting output was still clean/non-distorted. And this is being written by a person that listens to albums by Black Flag, Sonic Youth, NOFX etc so I'm not exactly into the dentist-office-volume-level way of listening.