So what does it mean when speakers are rated 100W?

[jjcha]

When it says max power handling at 100W what does this mean exactly? I've never taken this to mean you should use a power amp that produces less than that amount of wattage. But it ought to mean something, no?

Best regards,

-Jason

 

[mulveling]

Heh, I use amps rated 200 Watts/Ch on my K1000 rated at 1 Watt power handling. It's fine, because at sane volume levels the K1000 is going to see less than 1 Watt continuous power (also for the 120 ohm-load of the K1000, that 200 Watts max is greatly reduced). If I were to run the amp at near-max volume, then I'd exceed 1 Watt, and the K1000 transducers might heat up and take some damage after a while - but actually I've accidentally fed them too much juice for about 15 seconds before, and they survived fine (they may have protective circuitry, though). I take the the 1-Watt rating to mean that's the max recommended power they can be fed on a 24 hours/7 days a week basis, and even then it's probably very conservative.

Power handling ratings for transducers are almost never an issue because you'll pass sane volume levels long before you overpower them. The bigger issue is overdriving your amp into clipping territory - that will kill a transducer fast.

 

[soundboy]

The power handling figure on a speaker is misleading in many ways. Generally, they do not tell you the specifics....100 watts at what fequencies? 100 watts into what ohms? 100 watts for what duration? Things like that. For example, tweeters tend to fry if a lot of power is being pushed through them for a long duration....as in several seconds. Yet they can withstand several hundred watts for fractions of a second. Since a speaker is generally made of several components (tweeter, woofer, crossover, etc.), a figure like maximum power handling of 100 watts really doesn't tell you a lot.

However, you should know that speakers generally get fried when overdriven by an underpowered amp. When the underpowered amp get pushed too far, its signal gets distorted, or clipped. Such distortion can easily destroy a speaker. When one listens to music at typical volume, an amp is usually producing no more than 5 to 10 watts, if that much. Only when the dynamics of the music need the power will the amp be called to deliever the extra power. If the amp is underpowered to reproduce that dynamic as requested, it clips and produces distortion. Think of it as owning a 300 horsepower sports car....your engine is not producing 300 horsepower all the time, right?