I have been following the thread by TroyD about his receiver and amp with the M80v3 speakers and clipping/distortion.

I don't design amps or receivers or pre-amps, so I don't know the in's and out's of their workings. But I have managed to gain a few glimpses of knowledge over the past few years.

From what I can gather our amps are mainly analog, and so are out speakers. So they use a varying amount of voltage and current to drive the speaker coils in and out. In TroyD's case, the output from his pre-amp or pre-out from the receiver he is using is small, so you connect it to an amplifier to effectively step up the output to a large enough voltage/current to drive your speakers.

An Amp, if you look at the specs, have voltage gain in dB. I gather that is how much louder the output would be from the input. This is helpful if you have two different amps so you can adjust them to sound the same. But would that not also have an effect on the total available loudness that the amp can produce? If your amp has a lower voltage gain, it will take more power from the source to get it drive your speakers to a specific dB level than an amp with a much higher voltage gain.

Your amp can only give a clean amplified output, if it is getting a clean input. So you might have a 350w amplifier to drive your speakers, but if your voltage gain is low, then your source (pre-amp/receiver) could run out of juice well before the amplifier does to get the desired volume from the speakers you are looking for.

This would make the speakers sound like they are clipping when in reality it is the source pre-amp or receiver that is the problem.

Anthem: AVM60, Fosi DAC-Q5
Axiom: ADA1500, LFR1100 Actiive, QS8, EP500, M3, M3comp, M5