I had to drop this one mid-stream.

I was suggesting that it's not the whole story on either side.

Fourier says there's not enough POWER to blow a tweeter. And there isn't. There are MANY other forces at work. One is also, as you mentioned, that this forces the tweeters to take on more of their share of power - though that Rane article is suspect since it intentionally uses a low amplitude hi-freq with a burst of high amplitude lo-freq modulation for the author to prove his point... if you were to reverse the amplitudes, I could prove that low frequency drivers (ie: woofers) would blow first.

Damn, we're back to square one and haven't proven anything... except even "professional" companies (and Rane's one of the respected ones) may be trying to oversimplify.

So if I were to rebuild his Figures with the amplitudes reversed, I could prove that woofers would blow before tweeters... though that hardly ever happens. So what else do we look at?

Heat. So when you really overdrive a tweeter (even a ferrofluid cooled one like Axiom uses, which DOES help) as the wattage sent to the tweeter rises, so does the amount of heat generated, ever taken apart a tweeter? They're not nearly as easy to cool as a woofer with it's large basket.

So now that everyone's dug in their heels and given their side, the answer seems to be "nobody knows"... I like to hear others' opinions, many heads are better than one, but when trying to shed light on another's partial answer, suggesting another partial answer is the whole canonical truth is probably counter-productive.

Even Ian's quote is somewhat vague on what exactly it IS about clipping that melts down tweeters. But in the end, clipping kills drivers, what part of clipping it IS that kills them is still open for discussion it would seem.

I do agree with you that it's tough for the harmonics to generate enough extra power to fry a tweeter, but as others have said, it's easier for a lower powered amp to clip at a reasonable listening level (you originally said a 200W amp & 200W rated speaker would be a worse combination than a 50W amp and a 200W rated speaker; I contend it would be much harder and louder to push a 200W amp to clip than a 25W one, making the danger a low powered amp)

Bren R.