Can you overpower a speaker

Of course, these are the extremes. It is certainly possible to match one's amp and speakers so that there is little danger of overpowering, while having enough power to minimize clipping which is the result of "underpowering" that is, not having enough power to achieve a given volume level and the peaks associated with it.

Last edited: Aug 27, Guest , Aug 27, Messages: 10, Location: Great Northwest. Copa , Aug 27, Messages: 3, Location: Fingerlakes, NY. It's a lot harder to blow speakers than often talked about Most paradigms that come to mind I would not worry too much about them Most 50 watt speakers can take w I've pushed 5w speakers to 25w and 50w to w without problems Messages: 34, Location: San Francisco Peninsula.

And now I'll say Mono is better, better voicing, separation, no cross talk, more power capabilities in a manageable form. Your speakers will have a better response through out the volume levels and much more bass with more power. I like my speakers over powered. Messages: 6, Location: Indy, IN.

What is the unnamed watt amp that you are considering? HomeBody , Aug 28, Messages: 54, Location: Southern NJ. I have a pair of JBL L speakers in the shop. They are rated to 70 watts of power. A couple weeks ago, I was running them from a Phase Linear that I clocked at a bit over watts RMS output per channel before clipping at full crank.

They worked fine, but I obviously did not turn the amp up anywhere near it's max potential. I don't think I got it over about 15 watts according to the power meter on the front. It just got too loud.

Messages: 46, Location: LoTL. Better to have more power than not It is better to have a higher powered amp because it will easily play louder without clipping. Most speaker damage is done when people try to play lower powered amps say 20 or 30 W too loud and they clip sooner you're better off having more power to get the volume levels you want plus you have added headroom.

Gdl82 , Aug 28, Messages: 2, Location: Northern California. If you see it again it's because something has changed so please set your preferences accordingly. Page 1 of 5. A lot of people power Yamaha NS , which are rated at 60w 8ohms with w amplifiers. Or did the quality of the amp makeup for lack of power? What if the speaker will never be played very loud, does it still need the extra power?

Thanks for helping. Powered monitors are dealt with the same. The power handling of the speaker sis comfortably within the range of the attached amp. You would risk frying the speaker as it tried to produce a square wave from clipping the amp if pushed into high volume. My Studio. I was always told that the amp for passive speakers should have a lower power than the speakers itself, simply to never get the scenario where you feed more power to the speakers than they can take.

Don't take it as a fact, as i was told this many many years ago Speaker specs generally give a range for the power rating. That's 5x the maximum power rating. How's can that be a good pairing? The amp should be rated higher than the speakers. Otherwise you risk distorting the amp and the speakers may get damaged. The speaker damage more often than not comes from the amp clipping.

You can blow the woofer with too much volume, but the greater risk is the square waves created when an amp clips, which creates a DC current to the driver, forcing it to overheat and burning the voice coil. This happens regardless of the overall loudness when the amp is being run at its maximum. You don't need overkill, but you do need to give yourself some headroom. I see. So if you under-power a speaker, you're safe as long as you don't drive the amp too hard?

Suppose I power a speaker with a max rating of w with a w amp, but play only at soft volumes. Is there any loss of audio quality using the lower watt amp? Is there no danger as long as I don't push the amp hard? What if the choice was between a very high end w amp, and a mid-range w amp.

Would I be better off driving the w speaker with the lower power amp if for low volume applications? I always thought amplifier should have less wattage than speaker rating. Seems to be the way in guitar circles. No sign of trouble and it goes Loud. Deep Water Music. I'm going to try to clear up some misconceptions. It is easier to blow a speaker with an under-powered amp. Tweeters can only handle Watts, even on speakers rated for Watts. Since most of the power is going to the woofer if the amplifier is running clean , the power rating of the speaker is basically the power rating of the woofer.

When the amp goes into clipping, a beautiful sine wave turns into a square wave. This square wave includes additional high-frequency energy not DC, high frequencies. These high frequencies are routed by the speaker's crossover network to the tweeter.

So a 50 Watt amplifier that is clipping could send 15 Watts or even more to the tweeter. Even if the speaker is rated for Watts, its tweeter is only good for 10 Watts.

So a 50 Watt amplifier that is clipping could potentially send 15 Watts of high-frequency energy to a tweeter that is rated for only 10 Watts. This is how you can blow a Watt speaker with a 50 Watt amplifier. I should note that a Watt amplifier in clipping will also certainly fry your tweeter. The recommendation to overpower the speaker is to reduce the chance of sending the amplifier into clipping because you are playing it too loud.

The assumption is that you won't play it loud enough to clip the high powered amplifier because the speakers will be playing REALLY loud with clean power that is not clipped, and you won't turn it up any louder to push the Watt amplifier into clipping. As long as the amplifiers are not clipping, the 50 W and the W amplifiers will sound pretty close to each other. There are differences in the sound of amplifiers when driving a speaker.

I hope this helps, Scott. If you would use an amp with Watt to power a 50 Watt speaker, you would notice that the speaker is driven too hard by the amp, the signal would be distorted in an unpleasant way, it would look and sound as if the woofer is pushed outside of the speaker enclosure.

So I would always prefer the second scenario. Others here have described the same correlation, for some it seems to be illogical. But as mentioned before: the problem isn't the power rating, the problem is clipping if you push an amp too hard. This is more theory since decades.

Even my 80's cheap Technics Hifi-Amp had protection fuses on the back that would blow if the amp sends a dc current. Once at a party we used tinfoil to trick out the protection circuit after the fuses blew. Then the speakers melted Most amps today simply shut down when producing DC. No need to change fuses. A burnt out driver is the result. This can happen when the amp is too small or a big Amp is clipping at low volume for whatever reason.

But practically it means If you ask any unit in the signal stage to do more then it is capable to do you could encour damage. Good Gainstructure will keep those problems minimal. Thanks for the replies, that's what I though. Is that speaker W peak for 1 ms, or 2 hours? Is that amp W at 8 ohms for. Is that with a 1kHz burst or sustained kHz? It may be your amp manufacturer has bloated specs.

Unless you have the equipment and know-how, I highly suggest you don't over-power your speakers by more than 1. Better speakers read more expensive can usually be powered higher than this safely while As an example, if you buy some really cheep JRX 15" speakers, power them with 2x their RMS rating, and then try to put lots of bass into them, they will fry at least my neighbors did.

Under powering a speaker doesn't hurt the speaker. As Don pointed out, that is just silly. Over-powering especially cheep speakers without proper limiting and filtering can easily fry a speaker. If you put a watt amp in a watt speaker, you can play W continuous with 10dB of headroom. Still not enough headroom. Limiting is a double edged sword, by reducing the dynamic range of the audio you effectively limit the movement of the loudspeaker's voice coil.

With reduced movement there is less cooling of the voice coil which may cause it to overheat and burn. Are you suggesting that limiting will harm a speaker?

Sounds a little like snake oil to me. Last edited by Samc; 21st May at PM.. Maybe you should check before you comment A speaker is just a linear dc motor, attached to a cone. Any electric motor can be overpowered rather it's circular or linear, but generally it is it's ability to dissipate heat that will ultimately cause it to fail.

That said speakers drivers are designed for some specific purposes so the answer isn't that simple. A tweeter or midrange driver for example will generally not be designed to play much bass, and while diaphragm damage is the most common, it is indeed possible to damage the motor itself. I have a audax HMz0 that fried when I was doing a sweep test with no high pass for instance.

Basically there are 2 ways to damage a speaker, over excursion cone moves beyond Xmech and overheating long term power causes VC to melt and unwind. The first would be from too much bass or from a transient that had too high of voltage, the second is obviously from running it hard and long. Driving an amp hard for an extended period can cause it to clip prematurely if its not got enough time to recharge its capacitors.

I haven't actually tested any of these theories, so I can't state it for certain; however, it does smack of an urban legend to me. Tough subject in the abstract. Dealing with test tones on the bench is probably gonna be a lot different than real world live music when talking about the thermal ratings for speakers. Most specs are done with a tightly controlled test signal that has a 6 dB average to peak ratio although the AES spec was recently pushed up to 12 dB.

If your system has only a 6dB dynamic range it probably already sounds like crap.