Hero999 said:
Don't you have trading standards in your area?
Most of the car amplifiers and speakers sold in the UK also have similar wildly exaggerated ratings - it's not a question of a down right 'lie', it's a question of misleading the public as much as possible.
For example, a car amplifier might be advertised as 200W.
1) - it's four channel, so it's only 50W per channel.
2) - this isn't continuous RMS, it's music power, and the absolutely shortest highest possible peak they could measure, and only on one channel using a higher supply voltage than it will ever get in a car - so probably only 12.5W RMS.
So which sounds better? - a 200W amplifer, or a 12.5W one!.
This isn't a joke, these are the sort of figures than car amps (and speakers) are overrated by - connect a real 50W amp to a 200W car speaker and it's only likely to last a few seconds!.
Always look for RMS power output per channel, continuous, over a specified frequency range and with a specified distortion - for example:
65W RMS per channel, continuous sinewave, all channels driven, from 20Hz to 20KHz, at less than 0.05% distortion.