Question: Speaker placement – what is minimal recommended distance to rear and side walls?

As with every speaker, there is no such thing as a minimum or maximum of something. Every speaker sounds more spacious with more image depth and air, if it is not close to a rear wall. It is of course possible, as with any other speaker, to put our speakers right in the corner. But then you lose much of their incredible sound staging abilities, especially image depth. With most other speakers you lose less, because they in the first place could not create a similar imaging performance.

Question: What is recommended amplifier output power (for solid state or tube amps)?

This completely depends on the size of the room, the speaker’s placement therein, the music which you are playing, amplifier type and if you want to listen very loud or not. In our 140 square meter demo room, for instance, a very good 200W solid state amplifier can quite easily clip on a W5 with a dynamically recorded piano in the midrange, or an uncompressed female voice. Our W5 can handle 1500W on such music program, short term in the midrange. We have customers with 100 square meter rooms and for example a 30W Jadis integrated tube amplifier, delivering enough power without clipping to drive the W5 to quite shocking levels. The upshot is that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to generally answer that question. Depending on amplifier, room size and personal listening level requirements, anything between 10 and 1500 W can be suitable (we played a 12-W tube triode amplifier at the western germany hifi-days in a 20 m2 room to very satisfying levels with the W5). Don’t forget that for example between 125 W and 500 W there is only 6 dB difference.