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1 - you'll get plenty of volume from an amplified frontstage that you won't need rear speakers. Running externally amplified rear speakers will give you more volume, but will also pull your soundstage towards the rear. If you insist on running rear speakers, keep them at a low volume. H/u power would be fine for this purpose. Buying a 100rmsx4 amp to run the front and rear speakers is a waste of money in a small car like a z. Maybe if you had something big like a 7-series BMW, and cared about how the stereo sounded for the passengers in the rear, then it would be beneficial, but not in a small 2-seat coupe. 2 - Whether or not you'll hear the difference between 70rms on your front speakers depends on how you'll be listening to them. If you'll be listening to them at low volumes, where you'd never come close to actually using the 70rms, then you're not going to hear a difference by bumping up to 100rms on them. On the other hand, if you'll be cranking it, the extra headroom will be beneficial. If you're pushing the 70rms amp to it's limits, and there's a loud transient in the sond, you'll amp will be at it's limits and will clip the signal. Clipping sounds bad, and is bad for your speakers. If you were at the same volume, and had 100rms on tap, you'd have a bit of headroom, and would avoid clipping if the transient wasn't too much louder than the other material (you'd get ~1.5db of headroom with the larger amp). 3 - "It gives your speakers the ability to produce clean sound at higher volumes with out the cone bottoming out" Speakers are passive devices. At a given frequency, if you increase the voltage across the voice coil (ie - more power) it will move more. Increasing power to the speaker in no way can prevent it from bottoming out. Having more power on tap will give you more headroom at a given volume, which will help you avoid clipping. 4 - "JL amps sound like crap"
Are JL amps the best on the market, heck no, but they sure don't "sound like crap". 5 - Doubling power to a speaker ideally results in a 3db gain. In reality you'll see less that that (and how much less you see is related to how close you are to the speakers limits) because of power compression (the voice coil heating up, which raises it's impedence) and other non-linearities in the speaker. On a set of componenents, going from 1rms-2rms would likely yield almost exactly a 3db increase. Going from 70rms to 140rms would likely yield a good bit less then that, depending on how much power the speaker can handle. That being said, a 10db increase in output is considered to lead to the sound being percieved as "twice as loud". AFAIK, that figure doesn't have any factual basis though, and is more of a number that alot of people agree on. Think about it for a second; Is there any real way to measure what people percieve as being twice as loud?
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