This is probably one of the most widely misunderstood relationships. One reason for this is amp clipping; this is a state that the amplifier goes into when it cannot produce the power being asked of it. Since music, and movies, are not a constant tone this condition will start to happen at higher volume levels on just the parts of the information that are recorded at the highest levels. Add to this that some amplifiers are better than others at maintaining these bursts of required energy and you have made the whole equation even more complicated. But assuming a constant here for the purpose of this explanation, the higher the power of the amplifier the less likely it is to clip when asked to produce short bursts of energy. Since clipping both sounds distorted and is like dead shorting your speaker, this is a condition to avoid since it will sound bad and risk damaging the speaker. Beyond this when it comes to rating the wattage of a speaker the same "problem" exists, the power is not constant in the real world. The most common test for determining the speaker wattage is modified pink noise at the max power level for 8 hours should not cause speaker damage. This however is meaningless in the real world if the speaker does not have the mechanical where with all to survive the short burst of high power without distorting or damage. So now that I have probably made the whole question even more confusing, the short answer is that the VP150 is designed to reproduce both high continuous output and short bursts of very high output without distortion or damage. As long as you stay out of clipping the VP150 will deliver on high power. As a further note to all of this, the VP150 is also very good at surviving a modest amount of clipping. The VP150, along with the rest of our models, has very good voice coil heat dissipation which will mean it can withstand a certain amount of clipping because the energy is turned into heat in the voice coil when the speaker is driven into clipping.
Ian Colquhoun
President & Chief Engineer
