I've been looking at a few of the higher end mult-channel amps (Soundstream van gogh/tarantula, Audison, etc) but I don't know how many watts (at 4ohm) would be enough for good open roof highway speed listen? Would 50 watts be enough?

 

I'm running with my sony head unit that has about 23 watts. that doesn't go as lout as I'd like.

In my Integra I ran with 40W per channel and 100W to a sub. that was more than enough. As long as you don't want to shake your brain, 50W should be plenty.

 

Speaker efficiencies are importance factors to determine how much power you will need to be able to listen to music with top down at highway speed. A speaker with sensitivity of 86dB will need 4 times the power of speaker with sensitivity of 92dB to produce the same sound pressure level.

 

For your mids and highs, you'll most likely want something that puts out 100-150w @ 4 ohms per channel.

For your sub, you will want 500-700 watts.

I'm running the Audison LRx2.250 on mids and highs (120w x 2 @ 4 ohms), and they sound fantastic with my Focal 165 KP's.

I'm also running a MMATTS 700w x 1 amp on my sub, and I'm probably pushing only 400-500w to the sub.

 

Reason for my question is that I'm only a few minutes away from ordering the Soundstream D'Artagnan. At $350, with the flexibility to use one amp to run fronts, rear fills, and a sub, it seems to be getting me a good price versus performance sweet point..

My current thinking is that I'll use this amp with Focal 165V2 (Max. power handling: 150W

 

Soundstream D'Artagnan for $350 is very good buy. It has more than enought power to drive Focal 165V2. At 10 W/ch, each Focal 165V2 will produce a sound pressure level of 103 dB at 1 meter which is very loud even at highway speed with top down.

 

Excellent!! That's what I wanted to hear.

Too bad you can't bridge the channels. Just called their tech department to check.