Meyer Sound has confirmed my observations recording chamber music in a 50 seat salon with REALLY fast peak meters: live music has a typical 18dB crest factor in the top octave. I record in DSF so dynamic range of the medium is not a problem, but tweeter clipping is.
When music is at realistic levels for a string quartet or a concert grand piano, "RMS" levels go over 95dB on crescendos and peak levels go to 115dB - and orchestral musicians do not have much worse hearing loss with age than the general population! That's because compressed audio is worse for hearing, typically distorting long before this REAL level is reproduced.
Consumer speakers are usually 80-90dB efficient for 1 Watt, AT 1 METER. At 2 meters, this is 74-85dB, at 3 meters it is 70-80dB - OK, you get room reflections that boost this but still...
Speaker ratings assume "pink noise", and more to the point tweeter power ratings add a second order high pass. A 90dB 1" dome tweeter producing 115dB at 1 meter (the biggest peaks are between 10KHz and 20KHz) will need to handle 300 Watt transients!
NO WAY! Most tweeters handle less than 10 Watts of heat before they smoke.
I only listen to AMT type tweeters, which have 10 to 40 times the surface area of a 1" dome (and 98dB efficiency), which translates to 20dB-26dB higher un-distorted output. With similar allowances for midrange (8"-10") and bass (2 liter displacement), you can crank it up a lot higher and not get the hearing damage of noise pollution like pink noise (hearing tests), machine industrial noise or ubiquitous audio transient and inter-modulation (Doppler) distortion.
https://meyersound.com/video/m-noise/