You guys are scaring me

[Audiotfoot]

Thanks everyone. I can listen easier now.

 

[donprice]

Go hunting on YouTube for speaker blowing videos. Yes, it really is stupid but most of them take lots of very audible abuse before blowing. Watch a few and you may not worry about blowing one by accident again.

 

[maxhifi]

Go hunting on YouTube for speaker blowing videos. .

Don't give attention to people who do things like that! Suffice to say any recently made speaker is hard to blow. The old ones with paper voice coils and dried out old organic glue, on the other hand, are pretty fragile.

 

[pustelniakr]

When an amplifier clips, the signal that the speakers see (low frequency drivers first) flattens at the peaks, introducing harmonics that get routed to the higher frequency drivers by the crossovers. Those harmonics become audible when the clipping becomes substantial. Those harmonics won't generally fry tweeters or midranges. What will fry them is the fact that the amp is supplying all it can to the woofers, and as power is added, the signals to the mids and tweeters can still be increased. You are now changing the frequency/power ratio to the speaker system. Normally, as you go up in frequency, the power goes down (frequency composition of music). When your lower frequencies are being limited, you can continue to increase power to the smaller drivers well beyond what they can handle. That is how you can fry tweeters and mids of 200W speakers with a 50W amp. Speaker system power handling of drivers is designed around the Fletcher Munson Curve, which shows the frequency sensitivity of the human ear across the audible frequency spectrum. The higher up you go, the less energy is required for equal volume, so the higher up you go, the finer the voice coils become.

Enjoy,
Rich P