Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Clipping

Ian isn't the first to say clipping will distroy drivers. He may not have given the exact account as to why it does but I really don't see what that would have accomplished in the first place.

What some of you forget to understand is that the majority of the folks here and that visit here are not scientist. When Bren makes a reply he does so that everyone can understand not just the folks with 100 years of collage, same goes for Chess. There are times when JohnK posts a link or gives a theory that might as well be from mars, it would be better for most if when we try to explain some of the most technical stuff to keep the talk in layman’s terms. That, to me, is what Ian did in the original reply.

Wid,

I agree. Interesting that the original question was not scientific at all. It was almost Zen-like - "What does clipping sound like?" And then it went sideways.

Some of the folks (looking in the mirror) just don't know when to stop

I think I'll just go back to enjoying the sound.

In reply to:

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I think I'll just go back to enjoying the sound

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of your own voice?

No, of clipping, dummy.

Back in my youth when all I really cared about was car stereo clipped bass was prefered because it definite sounds louder. Tweaking our systems we definitely drove the amps into some clipping to get the sound we wanted.

You're probably right. I have replaced multiple speakers in the cars that my kids drive. I think that I know why!

LOL!!!

I wish I could get my friends to realize that! They'll have me listen to their "1000 watt" amp and check out how loud it is. Then I hook up the oscilloscope and show them what they are sending to their speakers and that they can really only get 1000/8 watts of power cleanly (we're talking crap amp here). Too bad clean sound isn't loud enough. Even after I warn them, they continue to keep the gain way up and blow both amps and subs every other month. Sad...

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.

Interesting thread on clipping! I just had to comment to revive it.