mono amp powering stereo speakers

One more point... And this is for Gabe, specifically. You said you don't like to listen to anything that isn't distorted. I can fix you right up: Buy a 1500 watt RMS woofer - a respectable one, and beat it all day with square waves from ANY 500 to 600 watt amplifier in the WORLD, driven as hard as you can imagine or understand, and you'll be perfectly safe until the amp goes, but you will never blow a woofer, guaranteed. If you do, I'll replace it out of my own pocket.It all reminds me of something that Molière once said to Guy de Maupassant at a café in Vienna: "That's nice. You should write it down."

Volfenhag is not equal to respectable.

haemphyst wrote: 1: I would be willing to bet that this is not what he said, perhaps you simply misunderstood. Any "engineer" will know that no transformer can pass DC. (Pulsed DC is NOT DC.) In a heavily clipped situation, the output rails of the amplifier are directly connected to the speaker, as though the output devices were not even present, but this is not the toroid passing DC. The power supply is still doing EXACTLY as it is designed to do, the failure is in the output devices being told to "turn on" to a point beyond what the power supply rails can supply. 2: Even if a transformer COULD pass DC, (in a WORST case scenario, i.e. a shorted transformer) the input side would only have 12 to 14 volts available to pass. 14V across 4 ohms is only 51.84 watts peak, ever. Even across a single one ohm voice coil, 14V can never achieve anything higher than 207.36 watts. In neither of those cases would there ever be enough power to blow a respectable woofer. 3: The toroid in an amplifier is already driven in a "clipped" mode. The input side in only driven by 12V square waves. The AMPLITUDE of the waves are ALWAYS the same - battery voltage, minus device drop; to get more power out of the supply, the duty cycle is changed, meaning the "time on" vs. the "time off" changes.

Thank you that cleared it up a lot for me.