paranoid listener-damaging speakers?

When you hear distortion at a loud volume, turn it down a bit to see if you hear the same distortion. If you do, it's the recording. If you don't, you're over driving something in your system.

Not able to shed any further light on your question, but Shadorne's point put something into focus that had been perplexing me for awhile.

"It is not well known but undistorted music can be played much louder without fatigue".

I had recently converted my little entry level Arcam/Magnepan system to a biamp system through an active crossover. Despite the documented gains in power efficiency's (no passive crossovers, etc.) I found myself listening comfortably and enjoyably at much higher levels as judged by the level of attenuation at the preamp.

I had noted the fact, but didn't understand the dynamic. Shadorne's statement just rang so true and explains my observations. Distortion, whether on the recording or in the playback system, really is a factor in percieved volume.

In my case, the distortion was from overdriving the little amplifiers in a non-active system and from the passive crossovers in the speakers. Free of that distortion, I enjoy much higher volumes for longer periods. Put on a highly compressed or poorly recorded track (yes, I do also love mainstream/pop rock like U2 and Audioslave) and I am reaching for the remote to turn down the volume.

Jim S.

You stated, you like to hear and feel the bass, As do I. Your speakers it seems, need alot of volume to start hitting you the way you like it. What you need to do if you wish to keep those speakers, is to add a subwoofer to your system. You will get the bass slam you are looking for without having to crank your speakers to the max. A sub will also give you a nice bass fullness even at low volumes, if that is your desire.

Djwilbourn - When you overdrive speakers you might damage woofers but when you overdrive amplifier than you'll damage tweeters. In either case you'll hear distortions before it happens.

In case of woofers I would be afraid of mechanical damage and not the overheating since average music power is only few percent of peak power. Tweeters usually fail when amplifier is clipping - sending a lot of high frequency energy (harmonics) to tweeter.

Jim S.

Well I am glad to see my comment helped at least one person.

Basically you need to think of your ears/brain as responding to the overall acoustic power in your room. A squashed distorted signal may have a much higher RMS (Root Mean Square) power than a nicely shaped sine wave with huge dynamics. (Distortion adds all kinds of harmonics that were not there. Compression flattens everything so that the sound becomes droningly monotonous at the same time as it adds all kinds of harmonic distortion and creates an all frequency at once assault on the hearing)

This is all very counterintuitive but real instruments (like a drum set) actually produce extremely high acoustic energy even if this only instantaneous and over a few precise frequencies. Ever notice how you can clearly hear a marching bands' single bass drum playing clearly from all the way across a football field. Average power of this kind of signal from a real group of instruments may actually be quite low (on AVERAGE) over long periods and across the entire frequency spectrum. Unfortunately compression and distortion from either a CD source (caused by mastering engineer) or from a the Hi-Fi system itself will turn the sound from a bunch of real instruments into highish energy for very long periods of time and over much of the frequency range and which leads to a very high AVERAGE power - so you are forced to turn the volume down and admit that it all sounds extremely loud and unpleasant. (which is apparently what Metallica, Garbage and many others are trying to achieve on their hypercompressed CD's - loud all the time at all frequencies - a complete and total assault on your ear and nerves)

To me this is the single biggest difference between live shows / real instruments, which sound beautiful and effortless (even when loud), and an overly stressed Hi-Fi or an overly compressed recording. Note that the distortion mechanism is different - in one case it is deliberately added by the mastering engineer and in the other case the hi-fi system cannot handle the true dynamics of real instruments.

Here is some explanation that illustrates the problem

When live music is recorded without amplitude compression or limiting, the resulting signal contains brief peaks of very much higher amplitude (20 dB or more) than the mean, and since power is proportional to the square of signal voltage their reproduction would require an amplifier capable of providing brief peaks of power around a hundred times greater than the average level. Thus the ideal 100-watt audio system would need to be capable of handling brief peaks of 10,000 watts in order to avoid clipping (see Programme levels).

The laymans article goes on to explain how tri-amping or quad-amping or by going to active speakers can get around the 10,000 Watts problem by dividing up the power demands across the frequency spectrum between drivers with dedicated amps. This is important on percussion where a brief instantaneous broad spectrum of frequencies leads to extremely high momentary power requirements. Another trick is circuitry such as momentary gain reduction to prevent blowing equipment up because of a crescendo.