posted
I've often pondered this and have been asked it by people doing systems. And, I thought that maybe we should start having more pro-active questions on this section. Thanks
How much power should you send to comps and co-axials?
1a) Do you, personally, send/recommend full RMS to them? 1b) Do you push less than RMS, if so why?
Is there a rule-of-thumb sub power:comp/co-axial power ratio (i.e. subs get 400 RMS, co-axials/comps get 100 RMS)?
Is it safe to put more power to them than listed RMS? If so, how/why? (clean signal, x-over at a certain frequency, etc.)
Any other information that you can think of that would help the termpro members out in their persuit of audio-perfection?
posted
I try not to use less than 50 watts to a speaker. The reason being is that people tend to want things loud and 50 watts seems to be about where you can get good volume without putting too much stress on an amp. 4 X 50 amps of good quality are pretty inexpensive and work great to power front and rear coaxes. For a higher quality system I tend to use either a higher power amp (100 X 2), or biamp the mids and tweets. What I do to determine the amount of power, gain, X-over point and so on is to disconnect every speaker except for what I am working on. Say I am doing a coax in the front of a car, I would turn the gain down and the xover to the highest it will go. Then using some test tracks find out how much power I can give to the speaker without worrying about excursion limits. Then slowly turn down the xover point until the suspension is at its limit at this power level. Sometimes you have to give and take a little on smaller speakers. You can get away with giving a speaker more power than RMS because since music is so transient. If you have a 200 X 2 amp on a pair of speakers rated at 100 watts, in normal music the speakers will rarely see anything over 100 watts for any significant amount of time.
posted
I prefer bi-amping and active filtering in all cases, even with some coaxials (and ALL biampable coaxials)
However, when using coaxials I would accept no less than 50 watts, as JC stated, because trying to get enough to have a "rockin stereo" out of most speakers with less power leads to clipping and speaker failure
I think the power rating on the amp SHOULD be approximately RMS of the speaker, because there isn't many reasons not to..
But, the old rule of thumb still works..
Buy as MUCH amplifier as you can with your dollar!
ShadowStar
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