Quote Originally Posted by John A.
I think some people have a, um, distorted view of how much clean headroom they really need. And newbies who (nowadays) get their info online rather than in person wind up down a bit of a rabbit hole. "Oh, no, you can't play jazz with less than 100 watts! A Deluxe Reverb is just a bedroom amp!" Not.

That, plus class D (with or without a modelling front end) has completely reset the trade-off among size, loudness and cost. I gig (including with drums and horns) with a 20 watt modelling/class-D amp that weighs 10 lbs and costs less than $100. My "big" amp is a Princeton Reverb (nominally, less powerful, but appreciably louder). I can't see needing more amp than this. Most guys I know use similar sized/powered gear.
True. The last 50 watt amp I had was over 20 years ago (a Peavey Classic 50). Even then I was leaning towards 20-30 watt amps for gigging. My acoustic guitar amp is just a small Fishman Loudbox Mini Charge (the "Charge" denotes that it has a built-in lithium ion battery pack - a very useful feature for me playing in the church band, since the small stage the band performs on doesn't have a lot of power outlets). I usually have to keep my amps at low volume (the volume control at "2" or less) to keep the sound man or other players from complaining that I'm playing too loud. Even for heavy rock music, it's too much of a hassle onstage to run an amp on full throttle (even the 30 watt amps I used to favor years ago) - it gets too loud, you have a hard time hearing each other onstage due to competing volume levels, and it makes a mess out of the sound balance (along with beating up on your hearing).

IMO, unless you're playing with a hard hitting drummer (or as I occasionally have to deal with at church, a loud piano player - I realized several months ago, that the music director [who plays the piano] has had a significant amount of hearing loss [after she told me she doesn't hear very well though her left ear], so she has a tendency to play loud, on the church's concert piano), 15 watt amps or less are fine onstage, for both clean, and dirty sounding guitar.