I hate to chime in here being a noob on here, but I was reading the very first sentence of this thread and I already found a discrepancy. The following line:
Quote:
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clipping is the number one cause of failure
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. Like I said, I'm a noob here, and I really don't want to step on any toes, but clipping is not the #1 cause for killing equipment. It's easy for a scrub to pick out the statement and say "but I heard that subwoofers in cars play like 10% distortion anyways, why should I care about bass boost?" I might say something like "clipping
may damage equipment" rather than "clipping will kill equipment", or of that nature. Just using a terminology to help make the tips watertight...
This might be a good point in the tips to suggest that power doesn't blow equipment, people blow equipment.
If I were writing this tip line, I might combine the bullets in this general area into something like this:
There are 3 basic ways to kill equipment: mechanical overload, thermal overload, thermal fatigue. Power will not kill equipment, whether too much or too little. You may feed a subwoofer any amount of power you wish. As a general rule, if you can't hear distortion, you will not blow the speaker.
Unfortunately, even this is a misleading and fallacious statement. The bandpass box user will be delighted and crank the volume, hearing no distortion and thinking himself set. No relationship is made between the three methods of speaker destruction and power handling, such a discussion would most likely be too long and drawn out for a general bulleted tip list.
I dunno, I guess if I had to compress it down to a bullet, I would say something like: "power doesnt kill speakers, whether too much or too little, overuse of the gain know plus overuse of the volume knob kills speakers"
And again, its still not enough, it doesn't call for how much gain or volume! Its a tricky one to bullet, I don't think I can come up with anything that'll be good.
But, to say that clipping is the number one cause for killing equipment is just a fallicious statement in and of itself. Clipping is where the wave starts to square off.
Its a rare system that has the ability to tune to ZERO clipping, however. The volume just ends up WAY too low. Only time I ever had zero clipping in my car was feeding 350 rms to each of my midranges, and 150 rms to my tweeters. In the end, it made no sense, and I swapped equipment because of it.