-> And so it came to pass, on 10-06-96 09:55,
-> that John Allen spake unto Dan Dunfee:
->
-> JA>         For years I have read and heard many people say that more
-> JA> loudspeakers are damaged or ruined by underpowered amps than blow
-> JA> out by overpowering the drivers. I had come to accept this as fac
-> JA> after hearing it so often. The "control" exercised by the higher
-> JA> powered amps usually came up during the conversations and in the
-> JA> article(s) as well.         Now that I have read some of the
-> JA> responses to my repeating that in the Echo, I have to question it
->
-> It's got less to do with control and more to do with distortion.
------------>8  text deleted  8<---------------
Jumping into this thread late, you're right about this, but....
-> During this period, the speaker is being fed 20V of pure DC power.
-> There will be some mechanical damage caused by the speaker being
----------->8  more explanation deleted  8<-----------
Your explanation talks about dc power being the products of the
overdriven amp.  Actually, the speaker crossover will send the dc and
low-frequency components of the signal to the woofer, which is able to
handle fairly large amounts of power.  The more common cause of speaker
damage is to the tweeters.  When an amplifier is driven past clipping,
the output approaches a square wave.  Fourier has shown us that a square
wave is really the sum of high-order harmonics.  These high frequencies
are sent to the tweeter which generally cannot survive large amounts of
power.
The ferro-fluid that Acoustic Research introduced in the mid-70s has
helped tweeter handling capacity, but not yet enough.
About to run out of time, bye.
Kerry
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