STILL looking for a sub need some opinions

[Bsimmer3000]

I didnt know to much about what clipping is and what it's caused by but when doing a google search every result shows clipping will damage a speaker???? Even the tech guys on AVS say it's better to run a more powerful amp than an underpowered amp.

Here's a quote.

The main reason is that clipping will cause sine wave signals to become square waves (as already stated). The problem is that square waves are operating at the max amplitude every period, where sine waves only operate the at the max amplitude for a short moment per period. In other words, you turn it up too loud, you get square waves, square waves run the voice coils at max power too much, causing them to overheat and fry.


here's a link a guys posted. Expalins a lot about clipping.

http://sound.westhost.com/clipping.htm

Here's a quote from that site

Finally, it must be pointed out that this shows that clipping with real-world (speech or music) signals creates not only the harmonics that have been described in innumerable web pages, but also generates a subsonic signal that is potentially very damaging to drivers, but is never mentioned. This signal has the capability to cause driver damage at worst, or unwanted cone modulation and additional loudspeaker distortion at best - neither can be considered a desirable outcome

 

[eFxpOlRoreDr]

when you are trying to pair an amp and a sub the main thing you want to consider is the RMS. RMS of a sub is the amount of watts that a sub can handle without being damaged. and the RMS of an amp is the amount of watts that you get from each channel. so if your running a 1000w 4-channel amd you are only getting 250w to each channel. and you dont want to power a sub at full power because it will blow it, and if you underpower a sub for to long it will also damage it, because it is not getting the power it needs for the voice coil to perform properly, and it will burn up the voice coil. so when you are looking at subs you want to find an amp that has the same rms rating as the subs. and i know this from experience because i used to think the same thing until i had one of my subs blow from under powering it.

also pioneer is a good sub, but jl audio subs are a much better, they have a higher rms rating, and they sound a lot better, but they are a little bit more expensive.

 

[snickers]

Just for the record, clipping will NOT in and of itself, blow a speaker. It'll sound like ****, but clipping causes no damage.

With a 200 watts RMS amp going to a 800 watts RMS sub it probably wont. Thats not even enough amp to give the speaker a good tickle even with the clipping.

But if your running that same 800 watts RMS sub with an amp rated for 600 RMS you could easily push the sub past its thermal limit during an extended period of clipping.