Yamaha HTIB Question

I have the YHT-395 system which has the same speakers. 30W in the nominal power and 100W is the maximum (at 8 ohms). For normal and moderately loud listening, in a small room, it's plenty of power for a clean sound, unless you want to rattle the windows. Then I'd suggest upgrading the speakers because the receiver will easily handle better quality speakers.

That I can't answer for sure cause I don't really know but I do believe that's input power which would translate to dynamic output? I do know you should set a maximum volume limit on your receiver (usually about 10-15dB from maximum) so that if you accidentally hit the volume knob or Volume Up button on the remote you won't potentially blow out your speakers. These speakers aren't really made for maximum volume for extended periods of time (besides, they will start to distort out before they hit max and sound like crap). It's always best to set a maximum allowable output which is less than the receiver is capable of.

I just checked my Yamaha's settings and it has a maximum volume setting of +16.5 dB so I set the limit to +5 dB.

Our family room is about 300 sq. ft. with a 12' cathedral ceiling. Big sliding glass door to one side,with a cloth curtain, carpeted floor, and leather furniture. Basically lots of sound absorbing material. We sit about 12' away from the front sound stage. "Normal" listening is set to around -25.0dB but have gone as low (loud) as about -15dB without any noticeable distortion or muddying. I don't like volumes so loud that you can't talk over them so if you're a loudness freak that likes to rattle windows and "feel" the base in your feet then this may not be the system for you, unless you upgrade the speakers. There are lots of options for speaker upgrades but I'm assuming you want to keep the bookshelf-sized footprint so that may limit your choices somewhat (you might want to consider MLT-2s for a bookshelf speaker upgrade). There are some settings you can do to increase the sound quality of the speakers but with 2.5" drives and 0.5" tweets, there's only so much you can do. I'm happy with the sound that we get for our listening environment especially after some careful adjustments but I'm looking at speaker upgrades next year just to get a bit more fuller and dynamic sound out of the fronts. If you watch a lot of movies or are a hard core gamer, you're going to want bigger, or at least more dynamic speakers. Keep in mind that listed frequency responses can be very misleading (very similar to contrast ratios for tv's) because quite often the way they are measured is not given and there are a couple of different ways to measure them, so comparing specs is not always going to work for which set of speakers is "better" than the other.