The first thing to remember is that it is too little power that blows up speakers, not too much. A speaker rated at 50 watts is in more danger from a 25 watt amp than a 200 watt one. Why? Most speakers are destroyed by amps that go into clipping under overload, in the worst cases eventually heating the voice coil to the destruction point. See if you can find Martin Colloms book "High Performance Loudspeakers". Seas of Norway use to offer some very nice kits, I don't know if they still do. Under no circumstance would I recommend designing your own crossover, this is undoubtedly the hardest part of the loudspeaker to design and is often flubbed by professionals. Stan
DIY speakers, Power handling.
Got a question, that any idiot with electrical understanding should know, but for some reason this idiot does not.
When constructing a loudspeaker, (ive read several books on this but non touched on this issue) how do you determine the loudspeakers power handling ability?
Is the power handling the same as the driver with the lowest handling ability?
Is it the sum of the total accepable power loads of all drivers combined?
Or is there an equasion used to figure this out? Like the total watt hgandling devided by number of drivers?
I am now reading some books on Solid State amplifier construction, and Randy Sloan touched on the issue that when driving a loudspeaker that the power is not evenly distributed over all of the drivers, IE, in a 2way design the woofer might use about 60-70% of the power while the tweeter uses only 30-40%. This apparently is one of the reasons there is such a sonic benefit from Bi-Amping so each driver will have access to the full amount of power it desires.
That is probably what im gonna end up doing, custom building the amplifier to match the drivers and bi-amping the little bastards.