Quote:
Originally Posted by Slec
An earlier thread led me to the decision to purchase new Fronts and Center for my Home Theater. I've done a ton of work with car stereos but I don't want that to cause a bad decision.
I have an Onkyo 605 (90 watts RMS)
I'm looking at buying either Klipsch F3's or Polk RTi10's. The Klipsch's are rated at 150 watts rms but have a high sensitivity (98db). The Polks handle up to 200 watts rms, but at 89 db. Significantly underpowering speakers can lead to distortion which will blow the horns. Should I be worried about that with the above speaker sets?
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Underpowering speakers doesn't lead directly to distortion per se. What happens with lower powered amps is that you're tempted to turn them up more to get a decent amount of volume. Once an amp gets near its rated power, it starts to clip. Clipping creates lots of high frequency energy--much more than in normal music--and hence, puts a lot of stress on tweeters. This stress can lead to burned out voice coils, ergo, dead speakers.
By using a much more powerful amp, you are not as likely to approach the clipping point when you crank up the volume, so the signal being fed to your speakers will be cleaner, and hence less likely to burn out your drivers (up to a point of course!).