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Re: blowing woofers versus tweeters

You speculations are wrong.
With all drivers too much power causes the damage and a small
percentage of that power could be clipping harmonics. With a subwoofer driver, however, the clipping harmonics are likely to be miniscule because fundamental tones in the 40-80Hz. octave such as bass guitar and kick drums would have clipping harmonics above the subwoofer's pass band (it would be protected by the usual 24db/octave low-pass filter).

Sometimes one can point out faulty logic by extrapolating it to the extreme sduch as a 1wpc amp versus a 1000wpc amp!
One could burn out any driver I've ever used in 32 years of building DIY speakers and the other could not damage any drivers. Now you guess which is which ... because I don't have the energy to type much more on this subject, so I'll just quote someone else:

From speaker tester Tom Nousaine's usenet post:

"I regularly test speakers near the burn-out point. What fries tweeters is an amplfier that has too much power. A smaller amplifier even driven into clipping is safer than a larger amplifier that delivers more power. Often a somewhat smaller amplifier is still too much but a bigger one never fixes the problem clipping or not."
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From another Tom Nousaine usenet post:
From: Nousaine (nousaine@aol.com)
Subject: Re: xmax

Date: 1998/08/14

Steve notes:
"Don't go into extremes. A severely clipped signal of 1 Watt or so will of course not damage a tweeter."


TN: That's because the tweeter is working within its power limits.
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"When an amplifier clips, most of it power goes into higher order
harmonics."

TN: That's not true. Why should that be so? The fundamental is still the same frequency. True there is more power put into harmonics but not "most" of it.
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"Let's presume that in a standard 3 way system, the tweeter typically receives about 10 to 15% of the total power. When the amp clips, sending maybe 70% of it's output to the tweeter, it'll burn out."

TN: No. That's not so unless the signal was 10 kHz or something. The reason the tweeter burns out because it just gets too much power. Clipping isn't the issue. Power delivery is.

But we do not need to argue this point. Tweeters are the lowest power handling devie in your speaker line-up. Therefore they are the most damaged device. The main reason that tweeters get gobbled up these days is synthesizer music. Acousttic instruments do not have any power needs at high frequencies. Synthesizers, on the other hand, can deliver full power signals at 20 kHz.

In the final analysis you are just noting that you can fry a tweeter with a 25-watt amplifier. You can also fry it just as easily with a 100-watt amplifier. Or a 1000-watt amplifier. Too much power is too much power.

People want to tell us that a 100-watt amplifier is "safer " for your tweeter than a 25-watter. It's not true. If you want to preserve your tweeter get a 10-watt amplifier. The issue is power delivery NOT clipping.

If the issue was simply clipping my original 'far out' example would still apply. I only used it to illustrate the point that the power delivered to your tweeter is the main concern. And that tweeters have low power handling capacity compared to the other drivers in your system.

I want to point out that when you are frying tweeters getting a bigger
amplifier will not solve your problem."



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