How much power is the average Stereo?

[plasmaninjaa]

I have a pretty standard stereo,
I need to know roughly how much power it will deliver to just one speaker...
I would just turn it on and use my multimeter, but I forgot it at school
So just roughly how much voltage and current does the average sterea system put out... its in AC right?

sorry I know absolutely nothing about audio systems.

[wintermute]

Hi Plasmaninja, that question is a bit like the question "How long is a piece of string"

Depending on the type of amp it could be anywhere from a few watts to hundreds of watts per channel.

100W / Channel seems to be fairly standard fair for a lot of HT amps. Once upon a time 60W / Channel was pretty common for reasonable solid state stereo amps (though 35W / channel was also common).

Best way to find out is to hook up a dummy load of 8 ohms (needs to be able to cope with the potential power) and measure the voltage drop across it when input is say a 1Khz sine wave (you should test at various frequencies as lower may not deliver as much power depending on the powersupply), when driving to just before clipping (you will need a scope to see when clipping starts unless the amp has a clipping indicator)

and yes the amp is delivering AC to speakers

Tony.