Nousaine wrote:
stuff deleted
I sometimes challange the Legend with what I call the "Underpowering Contra
Argument". If "underpowering" with a small amplifier were the true cause of
speaker damage then driving one with the output from your preamplifier or from
the headphone jack on a walkman should be avoided at all cost.


An interesting response but perhaps a little anticdotal. The
shortest job that I ever had was once I was hired to be a
bricklayer's helper. I was healthy, but not a really strong guy.
I was strong enough to lift buckets of morter and concrete but
after a short while I would get a little shakey. I spilled some
concrete once or twice on a wall because of my lack of strength.
If they had hired a stronger guy, it wouldn't have happened. If
they had hired a 3 year old kid, it ALSO wouldn't have happened
since the kid wouldn't have had the strength to even lift the
bucket in the first place. To say that the damage I caused was
not due to my lack of strength/control and say the proof is that
someone with even less strengh wouldn't cause any damage seems to
ignores some key elements of logic somewhere :-)

The problem is where there is enough power to get things going
but not enough to control things well. If my boss missed the
issue and somehow thought I could do twice as much work, he might
of made me carry two buckets at a time (like the other "Charles
Atlas" helper he had). Since I COULD lift two buckets, you might
say I could do it, but I suspect that there would have been twice
as much damage.

The issue with the speaker ratings is that they never tell you
how the rated power can be safely distributed across the spectrum
of the speaker or how they even arrived at the rating in the
first place. A "50 watt" speaker may only be rated for 1/4 watt
across the 5KHz to 20KHz band. As has been pointed out before, a
speaker rating is not linear across its entire bandwidth.

There may be some standards for speaker power rating but I don't
think that I've ever come across one.

- Jeff