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[Johnny Diaz]

How do you guys set gain structure?  How do you prevent your speakers from blowing up?  How do you know how much power to feed the speaker safely but get the most performance safely?

[Johnny Diaz]

How do you guys set gain structure?  How do you prevent your speakers from blowing up?  How do you know how much power to feed the speaker safely but get the most performance safely?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[Ian Stuart]

Generally speaking, speakers "Blowing up" is usually due to under-powering them. It might seem surprising but this is due to the operator driving the amps too hard to supply the correct voltage to the loudspeakers.

What sometimes happens is the amp gives up on it's task and starts to send a voltage similar to your wall power right to the terminal of the loudspeaker. Back in the old days, the driver could catch on fire and could subsequently burn the entire cabinet and possibly the stage too.
This doesn't happen a whole lot with modern drivers though, they are a lot better designed.

To keep your loudspeakers healthy, choose an amp rated higher than your speaker. 100% - 200% range is fairly common (that is 100-200% amp RMS rating to speaker RMS rating). Ensure limiters are put in place and, most importantly, engage hi/lo pass filters throughout the systems crossover. This is the most important step to ensuring that your loudspeakers have a healthy life. Failure from pushing incorrect frequencies into the drivers is the most common symptom for failed loudspeakers. As a general rule of thumb, it's acceptable to roll-off your hi/lo pass filters at higher frequencies than specified by manufacturer, but NEVER lower than specified. for example, if I'm setting a hi-pass on my tweeters, I can start at the specified 3k, but nothing should break by placing my crossover point at 3.5-4k.

There are many ways to set limiters, some people like to use a voltmeter across the terminals and set the threshold that way, others call the manufacturer and talk to their engineers, others just use an ongoing process of trial and error. this depends on the style of the systems guy.

Everything else in your gain structure should be unity. unity in, unity out. You can't go wrong if you keep your gain structure uniform.

Good Luck! Let me know if you have any other questions.

[Brad Weber]

I suggest starting here, http://www.prosoundweb.com/studyhall/tag/audio+basics, and also searching in these forums and in the old forums (http://srforums.prosoundweb.com/) for topics such as setting limiters, gain structure, selecting amplifiers and so on as these topics have all been discussed many times before.  And Ian may actually want to do the same.

[Ian Stuart]

I suggest starting here, http://www.prosoundweb.com/studyhall/tag/audio+basics, and also searching in these forums and in the old forums (http://srforums.prosoundweb.com/) for topics such as setting limiters, gain structure, selecting amplifiers and so on as these topics have all been discussed many times before.  And Ian may actually want to do the same.

What was wrong?

[John Roberts {JR}]

For one, the under powering myth has been debunked here many times.

Speakers can not be damaged by too little power, they are damaged by too much power either short term peak power causing over excursion, or longer term average power causing voice coil overheating.

When an amplifier is driven past clipping there is nothing mysterious that happens to the waveform other than the average power, and ability to overheat the voice simply continues to increase as you keep turning it up, even past clipping.

Several things you said were accurate or adequately so.

JR

[Brad Weber]

What was wrong?

JR already touched on a couple of points, I would add that while unity gain is an option for system gain structure, I am fairly sure that setting gain structure based on maximum or clipping levels is probably much more common.

[Bennett Prescott]

Generally speaking, speakers "Blowing up" is usually due to under-powering them. It might seem surprising but this is due to the operator driving the amps too hard to supply the correct voltage to the loudspeakers.

What? Oh God, dude. Why are you giving advice?

[luis Markson]

For one, the under powering myth has been debunked here many times.

Speakers can not be damaged by too little power, they are damaged by too much power either short term peak power causing over excursion, or longer term average power causing voice coil overheating.

When an amplifier is driven past clipping there is nothing mysterious that happens to the waveform other than the average power, and ability to overheat the voice simply continues to increase as you keep turning it up, even past clipping.

Several things you said were accurate or adequately so.

JR

Is there anything at all about a clipped signal that can contribute to driver failure?

[Charlie Zureki]

What was wrong?

JR already touched on a couple of points, I would add that while unity gain is an option for system gain structure, I am fairly sure that setting gain structure based on maximum or clipping levels is probably much more common.

  Hello,

   And.....Speakers do not "blow up".   

  Hammer

[Andrew Welker]

Is there anything at all about a clipped signal that can contribute to driver failure?

A clipped signal will contain many more high frequency harmonics than the original signal. This is due to the sharp corners that get introduced into the signal when it is clipped. Also, the more the system gets pushed into clipping the higher the average power that is contained in the signal.

If the amplifier output itself is clipping, then this is after any low- or high-pass filters and will cause other issues. If it is the low frequency amplifier, then the speaker will most likely die from over heating, since the speaker is taking all those high frequency harmonics and turning them into heat in the voice coil. If it is the high frequency amplifier, then it'll probably be over-excursion, since those high frequency harmonics  could possibly be many, many times the rated power of the driver.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/FourierSeriesSquareWave.html
The link above demonstrates some of these concepts pretty well. The sharper the corner, the more high frequency harmonics are included in the signal.

I'm sure JR or Bennett will correct me if I'm wrong.

[John Roberts {JR}]

Is there anything at all about a clipped signal that can contribute to driver failure?

Compared to an unclipped version of the same signal played through a larger amplifier, not much. The dominant phenomenon IMO for sound reinforcement driver failures is average power.     

That said, in hifi circles, with puny tweeters, there are cases where the extra HF content caused by clipping can stress a marginal HF driver, and there's an old JBL white paper that somebody will probably trot out to support that position. 

 /edit  the difference between a clipped and unclipped waveform in the same amplifier, is that the clipped waveform is also turned up louder making more average power.  /edit

Music generally has short term transients that are much more powerful than the average or continuous power level. Speakers likewise can handle more power transiently or short term, than they can long term so this is all good, so far. This is almost a trifecta of goodness, since amplifiers also put out more power short term than long term, but unfortunately amplifiers short term to long term ratio does not taper off fast enough enough to protect loudspeakers. 

The problem is this ratio of short term transient power to long term average power in music is not constant but changes with music type, performance, and even operation of the system. An amplifier sized to put out adequate short term transient power, to take full advantage of the loudspeakers peak capability, will typically be capable of putting out more than enough long term power to damage the loudspeaker.

So it it impossible to protect a loudspeaker, simply by sizing the power amp smaller, unless you forfeit a great deal of it's short term output capability. This is further aggravated by the less than obvious characteristic of power amplifiers, that their output is rated as clean (un-clipped)  sine wave power. That same amplifier is capable of 2x it's rated output power, if that sine wave is hard clipped to resemble a square wave. So in practice a power amp can actually put out more average power than transient peak power. /edit- I know this sounds inconsistent with my earlier statement that amplifiers make more short term peak power than long term... it's complicated. /edit

Technology is catching up with smart speaker protection built into some DSP based amplifiers that can limit short term and average power independently, but this is still in early days and not filtered down to lower cost models. Note: even this short term power criteria is a bit of a simplification, since it also depends at what frequency that peak occurs.   

I expect the entry level market will see this first inside powered speakers, where the designers work to make them customer proof. When operating without a net, you need to learn to identify power compression (when the speakers start losing output because of overheating) and back off, instead of turning up more, and releasing the smoke. 
 
JR

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