you're there mate, although theres many factors i take into consideration - i.e. components in the amp tending to give up the ghost if ran to there extreme etc etc RMS power is commonly (and wrongly) known as the average power output... but in l amens terms you could say its the continous output, so indefinitely you do want to try and match the RMS power handling of the speakers with the RMS output of the amplifier as close as can be (also taking into consideration things like impedance etc etc), but like I said i would always tend to go for an amplifier capable of a little more than my speakers RMS handling (NOT the speakers MAX handling!! lol) And again another reason i would get an amplifier with a slightly higher output, is that when you start to run high power from the amplifier, i.e. to its full capacity, you end up getting more distortion introduced into the sound - if you look at an amplifiers THD (threshold distortion), it will usually quote for example ' THD: 10%' , so here basically for every 100 Watts RMS output, 10 Watts of that is pure distortion!! And any good sound engineer will know when there speakers are being ran too highly - you will either get distortion fed from the amplifier or distortion because of the power handling of the speaker - and all you need to do,is... TURN THE GAIN DOWN hope this helps