What does a watt do?

Question

I'm looking for a good pc speaker system and i can see that the price of any system goes up as the peak watt goes up.
so, what does a what do is it the loudness of the speaker system or the power of sound or both.
THANKS.

Answer 1

A Watt is a unit of power. The more Watts the greater the power and hence the volume.

However, that's not the whole story. To obtain the best sound you only want to draw a small fraction of the total wattage of your system. So, usually, the larger the Wattage of the speaker, the better the sound quality.

Answer 2

The watt is the unit of power (in this case sound power). BUT BEWARE. Hifi systems are rated in watts rms (root mean square). Without going too deeply into the math, it's an average level. Computer speakers are generally rated in watts PMPO (peak music power output) which makes them look like 20 times more powerful than the true rms value.

Stick to a good make like Logitech or Creative and remember that if you get a 7.1 system you don't need such powerful speakers as with a 2.1 system as each speaker individually is handling less power.

Confused? Well it is a confusing subject! Hope I helped.