Mr. Foxen
Commercial User
Power amps can't even put out square waves, because a square wave requires infinite bandwidth and a completely non-inductive speaker. Those things will always round off the wave.
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Help me shut my friend up
- Thread starter agebbia
- Start date
Clipping is levelling out the signal peaks so a plot of +/- voltage appears more and more square. It's a line on a graph. Tube or solid state.
The name "Square Waves" strikes fear into the simple bassist who knows speakers are round and knows instinctively something square forced through a round thing must be a BAD THING.
Don't be simple.
The speaker can cooked by too much power, that's overpowering.
More usually bass speakers are physically smashed apart by sending too much power into the lowest frequencies, that's overpowering also.
Feel free to abandon fear of square waves.
Challenge him to try and explain in-detail.
If the answer involves 1) "DC current", or 2) "The speaker not moving", the answer is WRONG from the outset. If the answer involves claims of the amplifier putting out more than twice it's rated power, it's also wrong, and he'd better have some amazing math to back that claim up.
There are two ways you can wreck a speaker when the amp doesn't have "enough" power. You can break it mechanically by having too much low frequency content, so that the speaker cone moves outside it's limits (aka "the farting sound"). Where bass is concerned, the majority of speakers hit their mechanical limits before their thermal limits, so even a low-power amp with the EQ dialled in right (wrong) could potentially move the speaker hard enough to cause problems.
Or, you can have too much high-frequency content (often from fuzz or distortion), so the mids/tweets burn out from being forced to handle more power than the speaker designer expected. This is another case where a technically underpowered amp could manage to put out a signal that harms the speakers.
However, neither of these examples actually have anything to do with "underpowering", and actually involve "too much" power in the right frequency ranges.
Jazzdogg
Less barking, more wagging!
Beat the hell out of him with a whiffle ball bat. It hurts plenty but he'll be too embarrassed to call the police, press charges, or seek professional medical help.
Then send him a link to this "Amps" thread...provided he can read the fine print with both eyes swelled shut. Normally, I don't advocate physical abuse but in this case....jeezsh!
Riis
Then send him a link to this "Amps" thread...provided he can read the fine print with both eyes swelled shut. Normally, I don't advocate physical abuse but in this case....jeezsh!
Riis
huh?
i thought that was legit, that the only way an "underpowered" situation could actually be a problem was when the too-small amp was then driven into full-on clip in an attempt to get loud enough, at which point it produced well more than its rated power (approaching double) and heavily compressed on top of that;
if that power was now too much for the speaker for too long, it would overheat and die.
#1 and 2, you are right. But it's a well-known fact that traditional amps (not so much amps with SMPS, though) have at least twice their rated power available once you get past the clean power. So that part is legit.
