Wow. Thanks for the very complete response.
A couple of questions and points:
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A higher rated speaker can just withstand/dissipate more power. It's just like resistors - despite being the same Ohm value, depending on construction and size they can handle different amounts of power.
That's a great point. I'd never thought of it like that, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense. Pretty much tosses out the notion that higher-power-rated speakers demand more power than lower-rated ones.
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The amp has an internal power supply that pumps up the voltage above 12V ... I see clipping happening from 2 causes:
: Asking the amp to deliver a voltage on the output higher than the supply voltage.
Well, if the amp is intentionally delivering more voltage than 12V, which is what the car is supplying, doesn't that mean that you always run that risk? Or do you mean more voltage than the power supply is able to generate?
And assuming that the speakers are 4Ohms, that means that the power rating of an amp directly tells you how much voltage it can produce by taking the square root of four times the power rating. So a 75W amp can produce up to 17.3V and a 300W amp can produce up to 34.6V. Of course, nothing's rated in voltages, but that at least helps me get my mind around it.
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Second is asking the amp to deliver more current han the supply can give. Typically running a too low impedance load.
But virtually all car speakers are 4Ohm, right? So that's a non-issue unless you get a non-standard speaker or the speaker becomes damaged some other way first.
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If the speaker can handle way more than that, I see no cause for alarm - except for it sounding like crap due to the speaker playing a square vawe signal..
So that means that, since a high-rated speaker doesn't put any more strain on an amp than a low-rated one, and since a more-than-double-rated speaker should be able to handle the worst case from the amp, then the safest thing to do is get speakers that are rated more than two times the amps rating, yes? Ignoring playing sane volumes and economics.
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I'd say go with roughly the same ratings and be sensible with the gain setting, trust your ears.
'm using a 6x75W amp; front system is rated to 50W, rear speakers to 80W and the sub 250W (runs of 2 channels bridged, which should give 300W)
So even with all this stuff that tells you that speakers can get damaged when they can't handle the power that the amp sends to them, you still run your fronts and subs with under-rated speakers. That tells me that setup and sanity are probably bigger factors than most of this anyway.
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