William T Goodall wrote: >Sounds like a mutated and garbled version of the well known audiophile >belief that underpowered amps are *more* likely to blow speakers. See >http://list.miata.net/miata/1995-04/139.html >for a standard description of this. > The key phrase here is over-driving an underpowered amp. Obviously if you listen to music at a given volume, it is better to have a bigger (but not too big) amp working at moderate output than a little amp working at its peak. In this case the amp is the problem, not the matching of the amp to the speakers.Unless we're talking extreme mismatches of power outputs (where the amp has to work at full tilt just to move the drivers in the speakers), then having higher rated speakers is not going to make this problem any worse. Too much power into a speaker can blow it (that's an easy and fun thing to test next time you're setting up an outdoor or concert type system and your mate has got his Kmart or Radio Shack speakers lying around), and running an amp at near it's max power for long can blow a speaker (more or less irrespective of the speaker's rating), but simply running speakers of a higher rating than the amp doesn't do it. I don't remember if Kevin talked about cables in his original post, but it is something that should be checked, cheap or deteriorated cables can have the same effect on a speaker as the article describes.
Cheers Russell C.
