Let’s try another analogy. Knowing how many gallons of fuel will fit in the tank won’t tell you how fast or how far the vehicle will go. The mass of the vehicle, the aerodynamic profile of the vehicle, the power of the engine and the gearing will all influence how fast the vehicle will go. And there will be a trade-off to be made between how fast it will go and how far it will go. The relevance here is that the fuel in the tank represents potential energy and the power rating of an amplifier represents the power that it has the potential to deliver, not what it’s doing all the time. How that power is used makes a difference.
And another one: Buying a powered loudspeaker is to buying a car as buying an amplifier is to buying a motor. If all you want is a motor, it’s fair to look at the horsepower, because you’re going to build a car, or a truck, around that motor. But when you’re buying a powered loudspeaker, you’re buying a complete system, more like buying a car or truck rather than just buying a motor. When buying a car, would the horsepower figure be the only one you’d look at? Or would there be other things worthy of consideration? Comfort? Handling? Top speed? Braking? Fuel mileage? Reliability? Prestige? Resale value? Passenger capacity? Cargo capacity?
Let’s imagine that the amplifiers in the Makara could only produce 50 Watts. Now let’s imagine that the sound pressure levels and the frequency response of the Makara were unchanged by the fact that the amplifiers could only produce 50 Watts. What difference would it make to the performance of the loudspeaker? None. It does what it does, whether it does so with 50 Watts or 500 Watts or 5000 Watts or 50,000 Watts.
When choosing an amplifier, knowing how many Watts it can produce cannot tell you how loud the sound system in which it’s used will play. How loud the system can be depends on the interaction of that amplifier with the loudspeakers to which it’s connected, as well as more other factors than I can list. The Makara, and all other powered loudspeakers, are complete systems, so it’s a far better plan to compare real-world performance, as in what the speakers sound like when listened to side-by-side, than what they look like on paper. Take a test-drive.
The amplifiers in the Makara can produce 2500Watts each into 4-ohms bridged. Not for very long, but I’m told they can. I have not tested this claim because I cannot use more power than those amplifiers can produce unless I want to risk burning up the drivers. In other words, the output of the amplifiers is limited by the processing to below their maximum capability, which again renders their maximum power rating largely irrelevant. So, since I have more power than I need to drive the woofers to achieve their maximum SPL, then I have more than enough power regardless of what that number is when calculated in Watts.
Nobody buys a loudspeaker to own a loudspeaker. You buy a loudspeaker, or many, because you want to fill a place with sound, with music, with energy. If you start with the result being a room full of people bouncing to the thickest deepest bass they have ever heard and work your way back and back and back, you’ll find that some higher or lower number of watts that each amplifier is potentially able to produce on a test bench is not going to make a difference to how they feel being carried along by the waves of bass. Because ultimately the watts are irrelevant. How you feel about how you’re making them feel is far more relevant.