Difference between 40, 65, and 100 watt rms 6x8 speakers

[chuckle490 10+ year member]

I currently have two pairs of 45 watt rms pioneer and speakers and I want to add a 4 channel amp. Can I drive them with a 60 watts x 4 channel amp if I set the gain with a DMM. Or should I go ahead and upgrade to some nicer speakers, if so what is the difference between 60 watt rms speakers, and 100 watt rms speakers? I have a cheap sony head unit and two 2010 cvrs in a prefab ported box tuned to 37hz. Eventually I would like to upgrade to either some sa12s in a custom box or maybe even something else so I really want whatever 4 channel amp I get to last for a while. Thanks for any help!

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[Ahmed Johnson]

You will be fine if you use a dmm to set the amp. The higher the rms the more power it can handle.

 

[Slo_Ride 5,000+ posts]

forum went ballistic on my sarcasm so n/m

 

[chuckle490 10+ year member]

forum went ballistic on my sarcasm so n/m

What were you going to say?

 

[zako 10+ year member]

I wouldn't bother with setting speaker gain with DMM unless you listen at gunshot volume level all the time. Most of power consumption happens at the lower frequencies. If you have a subwoofer, then the high pass filter setting will limit how much power the speakers will see. Moreover, even when the speaker can handle a lot of power thermally (which is the limit that's normally reported), it may not have enough excursion to actually reproduce the signal at the lower frequencies without the distortion. To answer the question about the difference between 60 and 100watt speakers, sometimes it can be pretty much none when it comes to how much power they will really handle. I never look at the speaker's power handling figures, but xmax and fs would have been appreciated.