tcguy85
10+ year member
CarAudio.com Veteran
nope i am not crazy. i have 200 on each mid and 100 on each tweeter from a DD S4, and i still see the clip light blink every so often.A minimum of 150RMS? Are you crazy? I would say that is nearing their upper limit!
75RMS is plenty for those. Will more power help them out? Sure it will. But their MINIMUM is weeeeeeeell below 150.....somewhere around 50RMS
this is the reason why its good and ok to run such "crazy" amounts of power:
Music is not constant in its peak amplitude. The ratio of average power to peak power is in the order of 10-20dB. (10dB = 10 times power and 20dB = 100 times power). I would imagine that modern rock and roll/rap music the value is closer to 10dB. This means that with typical music the average power when using a 200w/ch amplifier is in the order of 20 watts per channel with the peaks rising to 200 watts. Anything higher than the 20 watt average will most certainly push the amplifier into clipping. With this scenario the tweeter in a typical bi-amplified system or one with passive crossovers will receive about 10-15% of the power. So the tweeter’s power is about 20-35 watts with our 200 watt amplifier. This is a lot of power for any single tweeter. But let us assume it is OK with this.
When the amplifier clips the energy into the tweeter is many times greater than with unclipped signals. (Of course the amount depends on the degree of clipping but it has been found that people will listen up to 10dB of clipping ). When this happens the compressed wave (now very close to a square wave) is absorbed by the tweeter (and do not forget about all the harmonics) and at this stage the tweeter goes to “the pie in the sky”.
