The power supply has way more than enough power stored to put out huge power for an instant. Such sadly is the case here.īecause music isn't a uniform sine wave, its all different frequencies and amplitudes, constantly changing. What you measure can actually contribute to confusing people more than helping them. Nowadays we have these standardized power ratings that are great for leveling the field but they do have the unintentional side effect of blurring what's really going on. Either way these impose their own power limitations on the signal as well. Right away you can see there's three things that can limit power: the incoming AC, the power supply stage (basically a rectifier that converts AC to DC) and the power supply caps.Įventually there's either output transistors, or tubes and transformers. To understand what they are it helps to know a little about amplifiers.īasically, AC power comes in from the wall, gets converted to DC in the power supply stage, and stored in power supply caps. Tubes or transistors, gloss over some details, basically two things happen. What happens instead when you turn the volume up the incoming signal is able to be handled by all the circuits just fine until it gets to the output stage. It can't, the fuse would blow long before that could happen. It never "consumes more power than it can handle in the first place". What I don’t understand is why would an amp allow itself to consume more power than it could handle in the first place. A big one is thinking of an amplifier as some kind of sentient being thinking about what it should do. Right you are, you completely misunderstand some concepts. I might completely misunderstand some concepts here. Lastly, let’s say a speaker can handle 150w of power, and the speaker amp can output a maximum of 150w of power, even if the amp clips, does it mean it won’t damage the speaker? Could amp that’s rated at 150w per channel deliver much more than 150w in transient? Could the source material itself be encoded to cause clipping? Let’s say a malicious sound mixer create a song with super quite music to force listener to turn the volume all the way up, but then there is a sudden loud noise encoded, would this push the amp into clipping?ĥ.
Another related confusion is, how is it possible that sometimes I see powered active speakers blown because it’s trying to play too loud? Would it be true that the amp in those active speaker should always be designed to operate within the limit of its power handling? Could active speakers (say your Macbook speaker or iPhone speaker) enter clipping? I’ve never seen blown MacBook speakers even though people play at max volume all the time.Ĥ. For stand alone amp, I get that the input signal is not really under control of the amp and is more or less fed by the preamp so clipping could happen when the pre-amp is throwing big signals, but why wouldn’t the amp try to reject the signal the moment it senses clipping to protect the speaker?ģ. More specifically, in the integrated amp scenario (amp with a volume control), let’s say you’re using a max power 80w integrated amp to drive a speaker, if you turn up the volume on that amp, would it just max out at roughly the speaker playing 105db and it would not go louder - how could clipping happen then? Meaning the integrated amp should not throw a signal at itself stronger than it could handle?Ģ. What I don’t understand is why would an amp allow itself to consume more power than it could handle in the first place.ġ. From what I read, I understand what’s happening when the amp is clipping and the subsequent square wave form that could cause heat issues for voice coils.