Speakers Vs Amplifiers - The power struggle

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MILLSY5

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Question?

Why is it that when you've just spent loads of money and your really up against it with the credit cards a major piece of kit starts playing up and needs repair?

Anyway that leads me on nicely to my problem. The piece of kit in question is my studio monitors which i have abused and now the voice coil in one of them has snapped and needs repair.

Does anyone know about the impedence (ohms) and power (watts) issue? Which should have the higher power the amp or the speakers?

Should the speakers have a higher rating than the amp so that you do not overpower them or should the amp have a higher rating than the speakers so that it can take the strain of driving them? I have been informed that you should never turn your amps volume control above 2 o'clock ( i damaged my speakers with the amp at eleven and none of the meters on my equipment peaked ).

Can anyone give me a difinitive answer on this one?
( i know you can you clever sods )

Thanks People

Keith
 
The way I understand it, you want an amp with a higher power rating than your monitors. This is because if you crank a low-powered amp that's driving speakers rated for more power, the amp will clip and blow your speakers.
 
You should fuse your monitors so the fuse will blow when more wattage is delivered than the monitors can handle preventing blowing up the speakers.
I believe your amp should be less than the monitor rating. If I have a 50 watt amp and monitors are rated for 100 watts, the fifty watt amp will still drive them at 50 watts.
 
Thought this one was going to be a toughy

What about the issue of Impedence (ohms )?

Any Takers?
 
dragonworks said:
I believe your amp should be less than the monitor rating. If I have a 50 watt amp and monitors are rated for 100 watts, the fifty watt amp will still drive them at 50 watts.

No.
 
Sorry Dragonworks, that's incorrect........

More speakers are blown from UNDERDRIVING them as opposed to OVERDRIVING them....

You want an amp that will supply relatively high, and clean, power to allow clean handling of transients that require a lot of power very quickly.

An underpowered amp will TRY to handle the transients, but will clip the signal, causing that nice "round" waveform to be squared-off into a tweeter killing monster.

A not-atypical application would be NS-10s (which handle 25 watts RMS) being powered by a 150-200 watt Hafler or Bryston.

Bruce
 
The Bear's on the money on this one.
As far as impedence goes, you should match the rated speaker impedence to the rated load on the amplifier. Not doing so can either damage your amplifier or shorten it's life span.
 
fashion

this is just like the fashion industry, its all to do with matching and accessorising. get stuff that is matched ,maybee some powered monitors could solve the problem ,well thats what I did
 
(everything berfore) ......... A not-atypical application would be NS-10s (which handle 25 watts RMS) being powered by a 150-200 watt Hafler or Bryston.

Thanks. Bruce. ;)
 
my speakers can take from 2 ohms to 8... and 250w.. that gives you some headroom, but i have an old rotel tube amp on 200.. is that gonna be a problem even when i never put the amp above 6 out of 10 anyway?
 
What monitors are you using Chris?

Unless you're using PA speakers, the only speakers I've ever seen that spec a 250 watt handling ability are these consumer-crap things whose specs are written by the marketing department (and commonly sold at WalMart)! ;) And they typically quote the PEAK power handling, which is a completely meaningless spec except to impress/mislead the consumer.

And speakers don't handle impedance - they HAVE a nominal impedance. It's the amplifier that needs to handle a variety of loads... high-end studio amps will handle loads right down to 2 ohms without problems, most others will handle as low as 4. All show handle as low as 6-8....

Monitors will have a nominal impedance rating - commonly 4 or 8 but some are 6. This load will vary with the frequency of the signal, but for rating purposes, they use a nominal or average value.

But anyways, to answer your question, you should be fine............

Bruce
 
Cheers people - this definately the place to learn.

Nice one

Keith
 
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