A Question for everyone

[Yukonboy97 10+ year member]

did u do big 3

yea I did

 

[luvinthebass 5,000+ posts]

answer my question, some of those Alpines clip early. you might be sending a clipped signal to the subs.

 

[dadydolas 10+ year member]

i doubt ur stock can support 3000

ur prolly clipping

 

[dadydolas 10+ year member]

in what gauge?

 

[Yukonboy97 10+ year member]

Question what exactly is Clipping

 

[Yukonboy97 10+ year member]

in what gauge?

Zero

 

[luvinthebass 5,000+ posts]

omfg

 

[Yukonboy97 10+ year member]

what's the volume go up to on the Alpine you got?

It goes up to 35 and I usually play on 25

 

[dadydolas 10+ year member]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipping_(audio)

read

 

[Yukonboy97 10+ year member]

omfg

lol

 

[dadydolas 10+ year member]

When an amplifier is pushed to create a signal with more power than it can support, it will amplify the signal only up to its maximum capacity, at which point the signal will be amplified no further. As the signal simply "cuts" or "clips" at the maximum capacity of the amplifier, the signal is said to be "clipping." The extra signal which is beyond the capability of the amplifier is simply cut off, resulting in a distorted waveform.

Many electric guitar players will intentionally overdrive their guitar amplifiers to cause clipping in order to get a desired sound (see guitar distortion).

All amplifiers have Voltage and Current limits. Some amplifiers will use creative techniques to increase these limits or decrease them as needed. If an amplifier needs to output 20V, but is limited to +10V to -10V, then the amplifier will output +10V. It is best not to speak of a power limit outside of specific applications where the amplifier has an output impedance nearly equal to the load. For instance, a modern solid state amplifier may achieve maximum power output into a load that is ten times smaller than it can thermally handle over a long period of time.

[edit] Effects of clipping

In power amplifiers, the signal from an amplifier operating in clipping has two characteristics that could damage a connected loudspeaker:

* Because the clipped waveform has more area underneath it than the smaller unclipped waveform, the amplifier produces more power. This extra power can cause damage to any part of the loudspeaker, including the woofer, tweeter, or crossover, via overheating or overexcursion.

* In the frequency domain, clipping produces strong harmonics in the high-frequency range. Extra high-frequency weighting of a signal is more likely to damage a tweeter than a signal that was not clipped. However most loudspeakers are designed to handle signals with abundant high frequencies, like cymbal crashes, which have a greater high-pitch frequency weighting than amplifier clipping could produce. Therefore damage attributable to this characteristic is rare.

Other effects of clipping include:

* When applied to a musical signal, the clipping may prevent a note from decaying in a normal amount of time. This can cause rapidly played notes to blend together.

* Music which is clipped experiences amplitude compression, whereby all notes begin to sound equally loud as loud notes are being clipped to the same output level as softer notes.

[edit] Digital clipping

This PCM waveform is clipped between the red lines

This PCM waveform is clipped between the red lines

Main article: saturation arithmetic

In digital signal processing, clipping occurs when the signal is restricted by the range of a chosen representation. For example in a system using 16-bit signed integers, 32767 is the largest positive value that can be represented, and if during processing the amplitude of the signal is doubled, sample values of 32000 should become 64000, but instead they are truncated to the maximum, 32767. Clipping is preferable to the alternative in digital systems — wrapping — which occurs if the digital hardware is allowed to "overflow", ignoring the most significant bits of the magnitude, and sometimes even the sign of the sample value, resulting in gross distortion of the signal.

[edit] Avoiding clipping

As seen on the oscilloscope, the wave resulting from the clipping is not smooth anymore and thus, pops can be heard. To avoid this, the overall level of a mix can be lowered, or a limiter can be used to dynamically bring the levels of the loud parts down (for example, kicks and snare drums).

It is not simple to eliminate all chance of clipping, as filtering can align various frequencies in such a way as to create excessive peak outputs. A highpass filter is one type of filter that can do this. The excessive peaks may become clipped even though the amplifier can play any single sine wave without clipping. As such, some audiophiles will buy amplifiers that are rated for power outputs over twice the speaker's ratings. They will then set the amplifier up with low gain, so that the amplifier does not overpower the speaker in the long run.

 

[luvinthebass 5,000+ posts]

It goes up to 35 and I usually play on 25

what are your settings at, like the bass settings

 

[luvinthebass 5,000+ posts]

lol

you know what that was referred to right?

 

[dadydolas 10+ year member]

it's complicated but not good

if those speakers are rated honestly

this is most likely your problem

 

[dadydolas 10+ year member]

unless u jus did some real bad adjusting