[zareliman]

Hi headfiers, I have a couple of questions:

I have been reading about amps and stuff and came to the concept of clipping but there's still some stuff I can't understand.
The theory says: Clipping happens when the amplifier can't intensify the signal enough, so the peaks of the soundwaves become chopped ultimately causing square-like waves. Note that I'm not talking about bad mastering or clipped record here. This is only for well mastered stuff.

Now, the square waves behave less like alternating current (AC) and more like direct current (DC) at some spots, which stresses the drivers (or any moving part in planars, armatures or whatever) because it's stops "bouncing" from one side to another like they were designed to. This already doesn't make much sense to me since synthetizers have been making triangle and square waves since their genesis and they play that, record that and do all kinds of stuff. Choppy waves have been at least 50 years in our music and I've never heard of it damaging speakers in regular conditions.
 
To my understanding the amplifier is taking a signal and essentially applying a multiplier gain to it. Now the input that the amplifier takes is line input which is 2V by default and it multiplies it (gain is basically a multiplier). I know older systems had a separate preamp and power amplifier modules for some reason. The preamp was to basically had a volume control, so it had the ability to reduce the signal through a potentiometer so that the sound system isn't at full volume all the time. This means the signal went from 2V to 0V in the preamp and then the power amp takes that signal and amplifies it to whatever.
 
Now to my understanding if an amplifier clips from a 2V source, isn't that amplifier broken or a bad design ? I mean if it has to do 4x gain, that means 2V to 8V. If it clips then it doesn't have 4x gain and should you be able to return it ?
Or is it that the preamp is actually raising the voltage above 2V ? But then wouldn't that be asking for trouble then at the power amp ? And wouldn't the power amp specify what's the maximum input/output it can take ? Is people really mismatching preamps and poweramps like that ?

And then there's modern rig that's basically a dac/amp combo that outputs 2V line-out and has a small power amp for headphones (that takes the 2V and does whatever, usually with a potentiometer either before or after the amp phase). Now many of the chips inside the dacs will also be able to limit volume internally through digital processing, windows also does. Digital "gain"is just a negative multiplier in most setups ranging from 0dB to -96 or -144dB, 0dB is supposed to be 2V, the maximum. There's also positive digital gain but afaik that just compresses the audio on top of the signal, in other words if the range of a song was say 0.2V to 2V ac waves, 3x digital gain just makes it 0.6V to 2V. The maximum remains the same but the minimum is higher, making the quieter parts louder while the loudest parts don't get any louder. And anyway most windows/foobar setups don't apply positive digital gain. So to my understanding clipping should be impossible in a single DAC/Amp setup unless you're making the PC output square waves through a program on purpose to force DC into the speakers/headphones.
 
TL;DR:
- Clipping can burn a subwoofer, does this apply to higher frequency drivers (from speakers to headphones and tweeteers, armatures, orthdynamics and planars) ?
- Can the signal become clipped if I stay within the limits and never give more than 2V to my power amp ?
- Can the signal become clipped in a PC setup where the digital signal is basically just limited in gain and the amp takes a 2V signal from the dac ?

 

[MindsMirror]

You could think about the burning sub woofer thing in terms of energy and power. The energy put into a system is the energy you get out. When you're using your subwoofer properly, ideally it will take most of the energy being sent to it, and convert it into acoustic energy.
 
A sub woofer can not effectively transform high frequency energy (clipping contains high frequency energy) into acoustic energy. If that energy is begin sent to the sub by the amp, it must go somewhere, and if it's not being transformed into acoustic energy, it's being transformed into heat. Subs and their amps can be rated at hundreds of watts, if that power is not creating sound, it's creating a whole lot of heat.
 
Full range headphones are far more effective at converting high frequency energy into sound, so that is not the same problem for them. Also headphones take much less power, usually only a few milliwatts which won't do much even considering the small size of the driver. The opposite thing could happen though, like if you are a bass head but you have a headphone with a weak bass response, you might damage your headphone by trying to pump lots of low frequency energy into it.
 
As with sub woofers, if you drive the headphone beyond its capabilities it could be damaged. You usually don't have to worry about that with headphones though, if it's loud enough to damage your headphones, it's probably too loud to listen to. Just don't try to use your headphone as a loudspeaker.
 
It would depend on the architecture of your amp as to what input signals could cause clipping. I think you're unlikely to see any issue with 2V.
 
You might get digital clipping if you are mixing multiple sources, like if you have multiple programs playing audio, each set at 0dB, or if you're down-mixing surround sound.