is a bigger amp rms going to kill subs

I don't think I'm being too picky at all.  The reason being is that when you you say "distortion kills subs" (or the more common "too little power kills subs") someone who doesn't know any better will think it an absolute instead of a generality.  I think it is much better to educate the person rather than mislead them.  Let them know that it is power that kills a sub and that distortion is your tell tale sign that you are clipping the amplifier.  Saying that distortion kills subs is incorrect as I proved in the video above.  The speaker does not care how much distortion is being sent to it.  All it cares about is how much power is sent to it.  Heck, to a speaker distortion looks no different than an audio signal and it will reproduce it as such (unless the power level is too high).  In fact, there is some clipping (and distortion) recorded on a lot of modern music. 

Ah, but who says that a bulb "lighted" out?  Everyone says it "burnt" out because they understand it was heat that caused it.

Instead of tackling this one on my own, I'm going to have my boss step in and explain this one since he's the amplifier and speaker engineer.

Steven Kephart

Adire Audio

sorry to butt in but i just want to say that everything that steven is correct, if you were to try such a thing you would see what hes talking about. distorting at low power levels wont destroy a speaker. it will sound bad, yes. distortion only destroys when you have a truck load of power behind it.

i dont know if this statement is correct , its like when u set gain on an amp; you set the gain at a low volume so you can hear distortion/clipping with out harming the speaker.  Correct?

Hi all,  a few things...

- There is NO DC present in a clipped signal/square wave.  None.  A square wave is a summation of sine waves (cf. Fourier et al); there is no DC component present.  It is a summation of a base sign wave (of the frequency of the square wave) plus decreasing amounts of odd harmonics.

- The average power of a sine wave is 1/2 the peak power (RMS voltage of a sine wave is 0.707 times the peak, power is V^2/R, so you have 1/2 as the average-to-peak ratio of power in an amp).  The average power of a square wave is equal to the peak power (RMS voltage of a square wave is equal to the peak, so they are the same).

- Power is what thermally kills drivers.  Take a 1000W rated driver, and run it with a 50W amp that has 100% THD - purely clipped into a square wave.  The driver won't care.  Now take that same driver, and feed it a 5000W amp that has 0.001% THD - the driver will cook amazingly quickly!  Even though the THD is 5 orders of magnitude lower, it is the POWER delivered that kills the speaker.

_ The reason clipped signals "kill" speakers is because of the increased power delivered.  Clip a signal, you increase the average power delivered.  Run a 1000W rated driver on a 700W amp, and clip the amp - you can generate up to 1400W of power with heavy clipping.  This burns the speaker out.  But remember, use a 100W amp and the same amount of clipping (distortion) and it's not a problem (you can generate up to 200W of power with heavy clipping).

It's the power delivered, NOT the format of that power that kills the speaker, for any AC waveform.  And all audio signals you can get - short of a total amplifier meltdown - are AC.  The only way you get DC out of an amp is if the amp is damaged and malfunctioning.  You cannot change the gain settings, EQ, bass boost, etc. to cause an amp to generate DC outputs (at least no amp that I know of - they are all AC coupled on the inputs and for good reason).

Dan Wiggins

theyre we go a much better explanation