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speaker excursion..."mo power"..and bass..Sean

I'd be interested in everyone's thoughts, but hopefully Sean will chime in...

Some reading I've been doing & the "is 22 watts enough" discussion has raised a question in my mind. I'll use the Linkwitz Orions as the example, but the real questions will (should?) apply to powering most any driver.

I've been reading Linkwitz's site on the Orions, some of the theory, what it takes to build them, suggested power..etc...and I remember some post that I read in the A-gon or AA archives stating that the 60 watts Siegfred suggests isn't enough to give significant bass. I read on the SL site that he likes the 60 watts as the amp will clip just before the speaker can reach full excursion & thereby the driver will not sustain damage. He continues to state that the higher power amp he suggests (a larger ATI) will result in the driver reaching full excursion prior to the amp bottoming out & thus driver damage may result.

>Proponents of "lower is plenty" might be, at least conceptually, in line with the needed power to reach a driver's maximum excursion (almost by defintion) being all the power necessary.

>Then comes the "more power, preferrably gobs more clean power" crowd that says more power is the best in most applications.

So my question(s):

>Is the difference between these two camps just "time"(instantaneous versus continuous power)? i.e Lots of mostly unused power sitting "idle" as a reserve for the couple millisecond demand of those dynamic peaks?

>From what I've read the SL Orions do very, to exceptionally, well on bass even with the 60 watts. How would 200 watts instead of his 60 improve the bass if the drivers bottom out at a little over 60 watts? Is it again just the millisecond peak demand for power that would be available or is there another reason?
fishboat

Showing 1 response by larryi

larryi
3,757 posts
 
Boy, you've opened a potentially big can-o-worms. I have no idea who is right, but there are those who maintain that it is far easier to damage a speaker with a low powered amp that clips than with a high-powered amp. I believe the theory is that when an amp clips, it outputs something akin to a square wave. A square wave is a sine wave with a series of harmonics. In other words, a clipped wave has more energy in the upper frequencies than the original waveform, and therefore, more energy is sent to the tweeter which burns the tweeter out.

I have no idea if this is true. I don't understand how anyone can run speakers so loud that they can be damaged. Long before damaging levels are reached, the woofer bottoms or the amp clips and makes a horrible sound, and any sane person backs the power down.

As far as sonic concerns (i.e., aside from the damage issue) I am not in the more power is better camp. With tube amps, I don't know of any pentode amps that match the sound quality of triode amps or SETs, assuming the speaker is efficient enough to work with the lower powered amps. With solid state, I like the sound of lower-powered amps, particularly those running hot (generally class A) over a really big amp that is loafing along at a fraction of its output. Solid state amps with huge banks of multiple output devices often sound flat and uninvolving to me. Maybe they really kick ass at high volume, but I never want to go there anyway.
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