To start, it sounds like you got a really uber cheap set of rear speakers. Sorry. There's different ways of saying wattage used by vendors. If you look at a sine wave, the line goes up to the top then back down, through zero then loops back up. The distance from the top of the loop to the bottom loop is called Peak-to-Peak. The very cheap manufacturers will use this number, just to make their stuff look big. So your speakers are probably 500w P-to-P. Unfortunately, you really don't use the lower half of the loop, anything under the zero, that's all negative polarity. You only use the top half, and the distance from top to zero is called Peak wattage. You'll find most vendors like Pioneer, JVC, Sony, Kenwood etc basically always use Peak...