Amp-limiting; safe?

[crackyflipside]

Let's say I have a driver capable of operating at it's limits around 200-300 watts before reaching overexcursion. Would getting an amplifier capable of about 200-300 watts be better to use than, let's just say, a 1.21 Gigawatt amplifier?

It sort of seems like a double-edged sword to me. In my mind, if I amp-limit, then I risk putting the amplifier into clipping during a loud transient. If I just put 1.21 Gigawatts of amp into it then I risk turning my driver into a weird aluminum cone railgun during a loud transient or any infrasonic burp that the amp recieves!

So what is safer to do, amp-limiting or amp-unlimiting?

[joecarrow]

Clipping is bad for speakers, too. It can produce large supersonic and subsonic signals that your speakers and crossovers must cope with. It's best to have some headroom- don't operate your amp to its limits, but don't operate your speakers to their limits either.

You know what the pros do? They use input limiters and brickwall bandpass filters to prevent unexpected signals from going to the amps. When you have to deal with dropped microphones, aggressively screaming singers, and unnatural electronic effects generators and synthesizers than can produce 5hz square waves, there's really no other way.

If you want to be safe, get some extra amp power, but make sure that your preamp is dialed in to such a level that it will have to clip in order to get the amp to clip- and then don't send anything to the preamp to make THAT clip. Alternatively, there are also fuses. Parts Express sells some automatically resetting polyswitch fuses. They don't trip instantaneously, but they're a good insurance policy against something that's more of a "burp" than a "pop".

Bottom like- I'd feel pretty safe hooking up a 200-300 watt driver to a 500 watt amp.

[ThomasW]

There's no such thing as amp limiting, this is a made-up term and a made-up concept. And the associated idea that someone is going to sit and continuously watch their LED's is folly

Generally speaking it's better to have more power than the driver can handle, than too little power.

Why?

Well the worst thing that can happen is to have an underpowered amp driven into hard clipping. This creates the potential for the amp to dump DC into the speaker and that = a very dead speaker.

When there's 'too much' power, the potential of course exists to bottom the driver. And doing that can also damage the driver. Bottoming is always audible, and usually isn't instantly terminal.