You’ll see lots of power specifications for the amplifiers inside portable speakers, and it’s natural to relate power to loudness, but the link is tenuous.  It’s best to look at the speaker’s loudness figures instead.

 What’s a Watt?

Power rating is measured in Watts (W). and as every there are many ways to rate an amplifier.  But for a portable speaker it’s not really important. You just need to know how loud the speaker is.

Most speakers have batteries that will supply about 4-6W inside, but the actual amplifier chip may be rated at 15 or 20W. And you can bet that the figure they will promote will be the higher one.

The thing is that to make a sound twice as loud, you need to increase the acoustic power by 10dB, which is the equivalent of 10x the electrical power – from 4W to 40W.  That’s quite a lot of extra power, and that power has to be delivered by the speaker’s batteries. If the speaker can run at this level, the batteries certainly won’t last for more than a few minutes.

 Why does the SoundBucket quote power figures

Well, you see as well as running of batteries, we can also run off an external power supply. And this means we can really use all of that power to make the speaker louder.

In this case you can make a link between power and loudness.  Clever Bucket!