Topic: would this kind of power be overkill?

[iamkroll]

oh yeah, ive asked the same question to craziechild before. won't giving too much power/headroom to a component make it freak out? it cant possibly take all that power and still be stable, can it?

[craziechild]

i think the answer is it could... but you just have to make sure it does through tuning...

correct ah mike?

[mnkh27]

i mentioned earlier on that the programme material only takes 3watts - 10watts to peaking at most 30watts of the amps output, so i do not really understand what "Freak out" means. ehehehe! 

alamak... perhaps you guys should google it first to understand the basics before discussing further -

for example, this article is useful and layman enough to understand:
http://www.audiojunkies.com/blog/1306/overpowering-underpowering-distortion-clipping-and-everything-in-between

basically, you can overpower the speakers all you want but do not "mechanically" over-drive it.

it is not that easy to fry a speaker driver unless you're talking abt 100-1000x more than rated specs or if the electronics is giving out clipping signals that fry/overheats the voicecoil.

crazychild: difficult/demanding tracks are those with many instruments playing + vocals? at the same time at different dynamic peaks. can your system resolve all of it and remain poised and controlled?

[mnkh27]

ok just before i turn off my lights to zzzz, i thought of this analogy... had to post it before i forget, since it's funny...

if you had a mustang with 500bhp and you drive it normally, you will not likely kill the chicken crossing the road BUT if you drive it without care and floor it, most likely the chicken will not have a chance.  correct?

if you however, have a boeing 747 with a 125,000 horsepower engine and drive it on the road, you will probably not even know you killed the chicken since it's so darn hard to see.  you will just see a splat on the road (i.e. burnt/toasted speaker with burning smell/hangus) beyond any possibility of life saving or repair. geddit?

always remember that when you look at your speaker drivers, besides the rated power handing, there are other specs to see such as sensitivity, peak power handling (i.e. 1000w on a dynaudio/morel) and mechanical xmax etc.

[mnkh27]

alamak, turn off my lights again then i thought of this:

i was at a scott buwalda seminar some years ago and i remembered scott was running his pair of midrange alone (3-way active) with 300w x 2 and we are talking about not via a passive. so, go figure...  time to sleep.  nite nite!

[iamkroll]

Took this from the article, but written by someone in the comment box.

"You can overpower a speaker all you want, just dont over drive it. Assumidly say you have a 100 watt rated speaker (assume it bottoms out at 100 watts real input) and you hook it into a 200 watt amp. no one is making you turn the 200 watt amp up all the way, just keep it under control and know the limits of the system, and know what it sounds like when the speaker bottoms out, or the tweeter freaks out (yes thats a technical term)."

lol apparently "freak out" is a technical term hehe.

but im still a little confused. what does power do anyway? to amplify signal? coz im thinking of it this way, even if u amplify signal, volume can be kept low. so the benefit of having more power (amplified signal) is that you hear more detail?

do you guys play electric guitar? can we use the electric guitar as an analogy? if u notice there is a gain knob on the guitar. turn it down, it will sound 'muffled' = not detailed. turn it up, u get the full spectrum. in essence does that mean that the gain knob is the 'power/wattage' knob?

[craziechild]

i thhink the guitar amp gain thingy is what we termed gain matching...

power in my layman definition: energy needed to move the speaker via the speaker voice coil.

yes having more power, you could have the volume kept low, but the speaker voice coil remained "controlled"... the higher the power, the more energy is used to control the speaker voice coil. hence more musical details...

just my 2 cents... flamming welcomed..

cheers...

[rbl84]

I always believe having more "quality" power is better than "quantity" power, and also by having more power your speaker driver is more controlled hence produces quality sound :D n not to leave out a clean power supply to the amp is equally important as amp providing power to speaker :D

jst my sharing peeps:D dun tembak me ya

[izso]

Wow.

You guys too high tech for noobies like me liao. I just put in amps because it sounded better than the previous amp.

Last time testing one A/D/S/ vs the Helix A2 in Mike's office on his Scans, the A2 was obviously the higher powered amp. Gain turned up a tiny little bit and listening to my preference of music - dance / techno and the A2 had pretty obvious sound differences.

So I bought the A2 instead of the A/D/S/. Just to power my Dyn MD100 tweeters. PHD2200 for the mids.

To the dude asking about the power, chill la. Try it, like it, buy it, use it. Don't care power overkill or not la. Like what Mike said - as long as you're not clipping it.

[craziechild]

hehe.... problem is... the amp is a sea away from my ride... and not available off the shelves...

hahahahaha....