Giving your speakers or subs less power will not hurt anything?

Question

i have been reading a lot of comments and answers on here with people saying that underpowering you speakers and/or subs will cause damage to one or the other. this is simply not true. the amp does not know how much power the driver can handle and it does not care. you can not hurt an amp by wiring any speaker to it...speaking in terms of power, not impedance. at the same time you can not hurt a driver by giving it less power than its recommended...only more. (rms value).

the only time i can even think that you may cause damage to your amp is if you have a low watt amp and you crank the gain and bass boos and other levels to try and get the most out of it. in this case, yes, you will fry your amp. but it is not caused by the equipment compatability....it is caused by an improper insall.

there is no question here....but this ssytem doesn't allow for informative posts like this.

if you disagree or have Q's...post them...i'd being interested in redaing them. or email me.

Answer 1

i agree with you for the most part.

And disagree with andrew almost entirely...yes a amp can saturate, and yess that is not a good situation, but as long as the thermal limit is not breeched the speaker is fine, dont believe me? hook up a 500 watt sub to a batteriy powered boom box and letter rip for 24/7 it will not blow...

when you mention a low watt amp cranked up can cause damage your right it can, because of 2 things one a low power amp can produce upwards of 2x the rated power. understand that a rated power is simply a point on the power scale where the specs were taking, many times the amps can produce more power at higher THD levels. also understand that in this case it is still a matter of too much power, not too litlle as the specs may indicate.

the true power handling of a speaker is hard to really denote accurately, yes RMS is the best way, but it is not a absolute. see a thermal failure can also be about average power over time if you will. see if i fire my tunes up after its been sitting all night the voice coils are cold and a bit more resilant, after i been cranking for several hours they have some contained heat and are more suseptable to a thermal failure.

Also another failure i see alot is a mechanical failure, and thats pretty sad to me because 9 times out of ten it is due to a inproper enclosure size... a 500 watt sub can mecahnically fail with oh say 300 watts if the cabinet is all wrong.

Don;t get me wrong, i think your message is a great message, and worth repeating as Sparky does all so often (we love ya sparky). But i think its important people understand some of the point i made above as well.

Answer 2

i completley agree especially when you say "speaking in terms of power, not IMPEDIANCE."  

i think most of the people who think that underpowering a sub is harmful, believe so because if you have a small amp you will probally try to bridge it.  Bridging an amp is always a strain on it because an amp bridged into a given impedance draws twice as much current as it would if it were driving two separate channels, each at that impedance.  Now you are putting stress on your amp which can lead to failure.

Answer 3

Actually you can damage a sub by trying to run a cheap amp that is too small.  What happens is, as the amplifier tries to put out more wattage there is not enough voltage or input signal available to create the desired wattage.  This drives the amp into what is called "saturation", this is where clipping occurrs. Basically, you are now sending out more distortion than actual sound signal which is very damaging to any speaker.