Hi there everyone.

I managed to blow a mid-range driver in one of my speakers. I've never run my system at maximum volume for extended periods of time, and I've never heard any distortion at high volumes either (until I broke a speaker). So, now I'm scared of doing it again, and I'm wondering how I can prevent it.

I don't know enough details about what actually damages a speaker to be certain about any corrective actions. I'm assuming that it was caused by the amplifier clipping, but it's possible that the volume on the empeg has (very briefly) been into the positive region, should the resulting clipping do any physical damage to the speakers?

I've got one amp for all four in-cabin speakers, with signal from the empeg front, and a separate amp for the subwoofer with signal from the empeg rear. If I use the EQ to get rid of all the low end going to the in-cabin speakers, it seems that I would be much less likely to be working the amp at anything close to its maximum power or signal amplitude, so I should be pretty safe. Is this true?

Does anyone have other advice?

I'm a little bit peeved that the guys who installed everything didn't set the gains so as to avoid damage, but I didn't explicitly ask them to, so I can't get too indignant. The only advice they had afterwards was "turn the gains down a bit". I could figure that much out myself!

Richard.