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[Rev. Rye]

A 5 watt Blackstar tube head through a 1x12 cabinet is a lot louder than I expected.

That’s because the basic factor in issues of volume is speaker sensitivity. The equation is SPL=10log(wattage)+speaker sensitivity+10log(number of speakers). Hell, with the right 12” speaker, a single-watt amp (turned up damn loud) would probably be sufficient for the stage.

And because the decibel scale is logarithmic, a 10-watt amp would be twice as loud as a 1-watt amp, but you’d need 100 watts to be four times as loud. I discovered this a while back and even created a list (admittedly rudimentary and based only on reported speaker sensitivity, so nothing but the Pignose was done at a proper full-volume test) of famous amps as sorted by what I ended up calling the X-score