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300 Watt Head 4 ohm with 500 watt cab 8 ohm

#2
It's safe as long as you don't push the head to hard. When you have a head thats rated less than your speakers if you push it too hard you you get a lot of distortion and "Square" Sound waves that can pop your speakers. Its better to have a more powerful Head as you have more headroom and clean power and can get more power out of your cab without damaging your speakers.
 
#6
BlacknWhite said:
It's safe as long as you don't push the head to hard. When you have a head thats rated less than your speakers if you push it too hard you you get a lot of distortion and "Square" Sound waves that can pop your speakers. Its better to have a more powerful Head as you have more headroom and clean power and can get more power out of your cab without damaging your speakers.
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I'm with CL, you need to read the stickies. This is simply incorrect, there is no inherent danger to "underpowering" a speaker cabinet. All that square wave mumbo-jumbo is simply incorrect. If you blew the speakers you were either running too much bass boost, causing them to fail mechanically, or the speakers were inferior/defective, or both. But that's not due to underpowering or square waves or anything like that.

To OP: No problems at all with your setup. Note that an amp really doesn't have an ohm rating; the spec just tells you what wattage it produces at the ohm setting.
 
#7
BlacknWhite said:
I blew two speakers out of a David eden cab rated at 500 watts through a 300 watt head dialed in at 9.
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That's because you sent them too strong of a signal peak, too often, in a frequency range where they were not able to handle the excursion.

The wattage ratings had very little to do with it! And the old "square waves" thing is an old wives tale--speakers are not harmed by square waves.
 
#9
MCJizzPants said:
Can i run this safely? 300 Watt Head 4 ohm with 500 watt cab 8 ohm
Im buying a Eden E300 bass head which is 4 ohms and i want to run it through a avatar 210 8 ohm cabinet. Would it ruin the cab or head?
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well 300 + 500 / 4 + 8 = 66.666

That is kind of an evil number

:hiding:

Actually it will all be fine. It would be better with 2 8 ohm 2x10 cabs.
 
#10
That setup is safe to use. For future reference what you need to pay attention to is what the LOWEST ohms the head is rated for, in the case of your head its 4 ohms. From there look at your cabs ohm's. Most bass heads will handle a 4 ohm load so it's safe to use a 8ohm cab since the load is higher. When you daisy chain cabs to figure out what the load will be simply cut the ohms in half. For example two 8 ohm cabs combined equal one 4 ohm load. What you can do later if you want to connect multiple cabs is remember that any combination of either one 4 ohm cab OR one 8 ohm cab OR two 8 ohm cabs can be plugged into that head.
 
#12
He doesn't have a 500w head though. The cab is 8ohms and handles 500w the head's max output is 300w at 4 ohms. With that combination however the OP won't get 300 watts out of that head. More likely he'll get 175-225 out of it. It will however sound bad if he pushes the head and starts to run out of head room. I've never used the avatar 210 so I can't say how efficient it is and what it sounds like but that set up should be ok for small places with PA support.
 

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