I have a pair of Cerwin Vega V-12F speakers and my receiver at the moment cannot play them to their best quality, and I was wondering what I should buy to power these speakers. I don't want to spend a whole lot, just looking for something that is enough to play these big guys. I'm not really familiar with how much power these speakers take in, because I got them for free from a relative. I know that they work, and my receiver right now can't hand them. Any help is appreciated! Thanks.

What receiver do you have now?

If you had done a search, you would have found that these speakers can handle from 10-300 watts, and have performed very well with a 100 watt amplifier.

Yes I did my research, and I have both a 110 and a 175 watt amplifier and neither can make the two speakers sound nearly as great as my uncles 900 watt amplifier. I know I don't need 900 watts, but I was just wondering what would work well. Thanks.

Let me get this straight, your uncle had a 900 watt amplifier powering a pair of speakers with a maximum wattage rating of 300 watts?

Its hard to help when you don't answer the questions asked. Stating the wattage doesn't help, brand and models do. What was your uncle using that made these speakers sing? What are you using? Eight years ago, when these speakers came out, manufactureers lied about true wattage on their amps under normal conditions. It doesn't take a lot of wattage to make a speaker sound great, just a good quality amp and processor. And of course the speakers need to be good.

Do your uncle's speakers sound better because he can crank them to a higher volume without the distortion you get when you do it?

Different manufacturers use different schemes to rate the power of their amplifiers. That's probably the reason for the request for the brand and model number of your amplifier. For example, a couple years back Denon took to rating their amplifiers' power at 6 ohms instead of 8 ohms. You get a larger number of watts when you do that, so it makes it look like they have more powerful amplifiers when in reality they don't!

Another thing that effects how speakers sound is their placement within a room, and the acoustics of the room. If your uncle has a room with better acoustics, and he's placed the speakers well, then that could be at least part of the reason why they sound better.

I know someone who bought a Bose 2.1 system because he thought it sounded great in the store. I was visiting him and he pointed out to me that he thought they'd sounded a lot better in the store. The next day when he was out of the house I did some experimenting with speaker placement and managed to get them to sound a lot better just by moving them a few feet. I was of course limited by his room layout. I didn't want to wear out my welcome by rearranging the furniture, too! The next day he moved the speakers back to their original location. I didn't say a word.

As far as I'm concerned, furniture placement comes in second place. Speaker placement comes first. In other words, I'll rearrange the entire furniture layout to get better room acoustics, WAF permitting.