Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Onkyo Receiver making a click noise randomly

Analog meters are not fast enough to display peek loudness ... they are design to do a moving average (think about 300mS but don't quote me ). They really give you an idea of the relative loudness. Your uncle's amp at 5W may have been pushing 160W on the transients peaks per speaker (depending on what you were playing) ... So, at 5W nominal into two speakers there is a good chance some of those transients were clipping unless the amp had enough headroom to hit 320W at 8 ohms into 2 channels. Even worse is that the speaker impedance is quoted as it's nominal impedance. It actually varies with frequency so to be clip free it's possible that the headroom would need to be even higher (I'm guessing that the 15db transient factor doesn't account for that ... it would be great if someone with a bit more knowledge could verify it),

Also most UV meter measure voltage and I'll assume for an 8 ohm speaker ... if the speakers was 4 ohms that reading would be twice as much