So, what causes damage?


I was all set to jump in here with elaborate explanations... but Michael (mtempsch) did SO much better a job of it than I could ever do that I'll restrict myself to just one point that nobody brought up: one of the best ways to damage speakers is to feed them frequencies that they are not designed to handle. Hook your tweeters up to your subwoofer amplifier, cross it over at 80 Hz, and you'll see the smoke leak out of them in a hurry.

Other than that, just choose speakers that can handle the power required to play them at a listenable level -- and don't play them louder than that! -- and you'll be OK.

You could have a single 4" speaker connected to a 1,000 watt amplifier, and as long as you had the gain on that amplifier set to a level that wasn't too loud for the speaker, you would have no problems.

My system is nominally 1400 watts (five 2x100 class T amplifiers, with two of them running bridged mono) but I doubt if I have ever actually pulled more than 300 watts total out of it. None of the gains on the amplifiers are at more than half maximum, I'm running the input signals through potentiometers so I can tweak each amplifier individually and those pots are by default at half maximum volume, and I generally have the empeg running at -20 dB, with only three of the EQ channels at zero, the rest anywhere from two to 6 dB down. As Bitt suggested, that's head room.

With those settings my speakers are safe. But if I were to maximize the gains at every step along the way, I'm pretty sure I could catch all of them except for the subwoofers on fire.

tanstaafl.

tanstaafl.