Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Clipping

There was a link posted a while back to an article which talked about "dynamic compression" (their term, I think) being a more significant contributor than hard clipping to speaker damage when the amp is overdriven. The gist of it was that most of the damage happens before the levels are so high that you get square waves -- there is a period in between where the signal clips at the extremes of the low frequency cycles, but during the rest of the cycle the high frequencies can keep getting louder even if the bass is limited. The result is that you can crank the volume maybe 10-20dB higher than the onset of clipping without the signal SEEMING to be all that loud.

If you had a more powerful amp and were playing at the same volume control setting, the result would be much louder and you would probably not turn the volume up so high -- and so the HF signal levels would not be so high either.

The two views seemed pretty compatible to me but I thought this article was important... bottom line is that overdriving the amp results in relatively more high frequency power than the speakers are designed to handle, resulting in unhappy speakers.