Distortion and Tweeter

[Chrisk-K]

Someone told me that distortion could damage the tweeter. Is this true?

[JimmyM]

yes, especially fuzz.

[bongomania]

Yes, plus distortion through a tweeter just sounds horrible in most cases. For distorted sounds, I either don't use a tweeter at all, or I turn down the highs.

[colcifer]

How does it damage the tweeter?

[T-Bird]

Hi.

Not by itself.

Originally Posted by colcifer

How does it damage the tweeter?

The distortion is not the problem, telling the speaker(tweeter)-distortion and the amplified distortion apart is.

Amplifying a overdriven/distorted signal does not damage speakers unless the speaker itself is overdriven. If it would, Hi-Fi tweeters would blow all the time when listening hevily distorted music.

Regards
Sam

[Bassmec]

Originally Posted by colcifer

How does it damage the tweeter?

If you imagine fuzz is pretty much square wave then the crossover mistakes the square wave at one frequency because
it sees the block peak as multiple peaks all overlapping and sends an incorrect much larger proportion of the signal to the tweeter.

[billfitzmaurice]

Originally Posted by colcifer

How does it damage the tweeter?

Distortion (clipping) greatly increases the harmonic content of a signal, boosting the power density in the high mids and highs by as much as ten or more compared to a clean signal. A tweeter that might see 25 watts normally can see 250 watts or more, and that's the end of the tweeter. This fact is the source of the underpowering myth. Increased harmonics have no effect on woofers.

Hi-Fi tweeters would blow all the time when listening hevily distorted music.

The situation isn't the same with recorded content, which has been mixed to give a uniform power density across the power bandwidth. If you did send 10 times the normal high frequency content into a hi-fi tweeter it would most assuredly blow.