We read and hear all the time profound "truths" about this hobby of ours, some true, some false, some so outright exaggerated that we can't stop laughing.
If you know some good ones, this is the place to expose them to the elements.
Let's have a good collection of them.

Let me start:

The volume at which you play the music is exact if, when you go to another room, you can say that the band or singer is really present and playing in that room. True? Yes.

Another one: just like trimming the length of the quarterwave elements in a dipole or yagi antenna to exactly the same lengths is of the utmost importance, specially for transmitting; the wires transmitting the signal from the amp to the speakers must be exactly the same length. True? No.

Axioms sound better with wood veneer cabinets.

And falsities are easy to spot on any 14 year old.

I think that you are inserting an extra "t" when you say falsities.

about the extra "t", that reminds me about a nice french canadian ability to pronounce english, as taught by publicity agencies:

"Hi ave ealty teet".
"ealty" = healthy.

any other gems like this?

As much as it would have hurt me, even I would have capped French Canadian.

Any time anyone says "fallacies", I can't help but think of the movie Who's Harry Crumb.

I minimalist approach to crossover design (1st order) sounds best - Not necessarily.

Quote:"Distortion can cause problems in any speaker because the distortion components can be passed by a crossover and end up in a high frequency driver not designed to handle large amounts of power."

Answer:According to what you say, if you were to send to the prepro/amp a bad recording of a song (containing distortion), when this distorted sound would go to the speakers, the distortion contained in the recording would go to the tweeter, overload it with unduly large amounts of power, and put the tweeter in danger of overheating.

If you'd like to check if distortion damages tweeters, get this file:Thomas Edison - Great Speeches - 1887, First Gramophone Recording Ever.mp3
and play it on your system. The sound is very distorted so it should make a very good test.

I think speakers don't know and don't care if a signal is distorted or not. They just reproduce what is sent to them, no more, no less.
In fact, you can be certain that signals without any distortion don't exist.

Sending too much power to a speaker can damage it; distortion does not damage speakers, it only muddies the sound.

If you'd like to check if distortion damages tweeters, get this file:Thomas Edison - Great Speeches - 1887, First Gramophone Recording Ever.mp3
and play it on your system. The sound is very distorted so it should make a very good test.

>> ... distortion does not damage speakers...

So are you saying that you don't belive in the common wisdom that clipping damages speakers? Or is your comment only related to distortion in the form of sonic "inaccuracies". I've bought into the clipping wisdom, so I'm curious.

Distortion from an amplifier pushed into clipping will damage a speaker quicker than driving it with too much clean power.

It's very difficult to record a clipped signal and have it's DC component make it all the way to the speaker.

Say someone is overdriving a guitar amp. Guitar amps are usually mic'd, the microphone can't produce a DC signal, so it won't make it to the recording.

As you move up the chain, mic pre-amp, mixing board, mastering, it does become easier for a DC signal to end up on the the disc, but then there's playback.

It's just as hard to get a DC signal out of an amp (that isn't over driven) even if it appears in the music source.

Really the only place one has to worry about dangerous distortion from clipping is when it is being generated by the amplifier connected to the speakers. In a recording you'll only hear the harmonic components of said clipping.

Oh, that's good to know. I've been concerned about playing badly compressed MP3s on my Axioms. I usually downrate those MP3s and re-rip them if possible, but they still sneak in there.

it's not clipping that damages speakers, but Power.
if you increase the volume to the point where there is heavy clipping, then the amp is in effect putting out more power than it was designed for, and it's this power - if sufficiently high - that will destroy speakers.
if a 50 Watt amp is clipping heavily and the total power going to a speaker is 100 watts and the speaker can take let's say, 125 Watts, then those speakers will be fine, whatever the form of the signal; even if it would be a triangle wave (resembling the teeth of a saw).
the speakers don't know the difference between a clean signal or a distorted one; they only thing they know is "power", and too much of it will heat up and break the speaker.

i would not qualify what you refer to as being "wisdom", but a myth invented by people who imagine an answer for a given unknown or problem, and then "make" it a truth.

it's a bit like the difference between religion and science.

There is no reason to be afraid of playing badly compressed music files; the sound system you have does not know the difference between good and bad compression or whatever kind of distortion it can encounter.

A sound system only reproduces what it is given to reproduce, whether good or bad.

You may understand what you're trying to say, but you're not explaining it well.

Power is the right word, but is not interchangeable with Watts. Power is Watts over time. An amp driven into clipping is not going to be putting out much more in terms of Wattage as it's maximum during clean amplification. But the power output will be considerably higher, due in fact to the shape of the output waveform. Alternating current (AC) spends very little time at peak Wattage, and thus has a low total power. DC (direct current) is constant, and thus will quickly present the voice coil with an excessive amount of power to dissipate as heat. So triangle waves just touch peak wattage for the shortest possible time, but if they are clipped at peak wattage, the time spent there is longer, and thus higher power output.

Most amps are not DC coupled, and so will not reproduce a DC signal fed to their input. Some amp designers think that DC reproduction is a good thing and go to efforts to make the amp be able to do so. I don't see that is a plus at all. A speaker should never see DC.

Audio with dynamic range compression (not psychoacoustic lossy compression) do have a higher total audio power (that's why they sound louder). But still are AC signals. They will have the speaker dissipating more heat, but you hearing will go before the voice coil. So trust your ears when playing music with large amounts of compression applied. If it sounds too loud, turn it down.