Hello. Welcome to Dynaudio‘s Ask the Expert. My name is Otto. Today we will take a look through specification sheets. Okay, so there's a point I'd like to make about power handling. I've seen a lot of people seem to compare it with power supplies. Say a graphics card in a computer... If you're building your own computers, you're used to that the power needs to match. If I have a graphics card that has a 100 watts power consumption, then my power supply needs to be a 100 watts. But an amplifier is not a power supply. So you have to get rid of that mindset when you are trying to match the amplifier to the loudspeaker. It's a different situation. The amplifier contains the power supply, but that's a different story. The difference is, the power you're actually delivering to the loudspeaker is being controlled by the volume control, so you don't have a fixed number that you need to drive the loudspeaker. The number you're driving the loudspeaker with depends on the volume control. When you turn up the volume, you increase the voltage going into the loudspeaker. So in terms of how much power you actually need, that really depends on a lot of factors. Especially room size and sound pressure level. How loud to actually want it to get. These actually have more impact on the requirements of the amplifier than which loudspeaker you're using. Just to give some examples: If you double the room size, you double the listening distance. Essentially you need four times the power to deliver that extra output. If you double the perceived sound pressure level, a perceived sound pressure level is actually 10 dB difference. But a power input, a doubling in power input is only 3 dB difference. So, to actually double the perceived loudness, you need 10 times as much power going into the loudspeaker. So your perception of how loud you want it to be can severely change the amount of power you need from the amplifier. So if we put those two together: If you want to play loud in a big room, you might need 40 times as much power going into the same loudspeaker as if you're playing on a lower level in a smaller room. So that gives an idea of how different these numbers can be. One other thing to keep in mind is content, which also makes it just as bad, in terms of how you look at it. If you are halfing the frequency, the energy you need to put in to provide the same sound pressure level is four times as much. Just like with the doubling of distance. So if you are playing at 30 hertz, you need four times as much input power as playing the same loudness level at 60 hertz. So the content, how much bass, how much deep bass is in the content will severely affect how much power you need into the loudspeaker. How much you need really depends on all of these factors, and the difference in different loudspeakers is typically only a few decibels. So it really depends on how you're using it. This is why we can never really just give you a number. This is how much amplifier power you need for your specific loudspeaker. Because we don't know what the situation is. Very often I get the feeling that one of the reasons people are very focused on this number for power handling, is people are afraid of breaking their loudspeakers. You know, if you play too loud, you can damage your speaker, which is true. But to understand how to treat that, let's look at what actually breaks loudspeakers. There are two main things that can typically break a loudspeaker when we're talking passive loudspeakers. One is you're trying to play louder than your amplifier can handle. So you get clipping from the amplifier. What clipping means is you're trying to make a curve from the amplifier and it doesn't have enough output power. So it will actually clip the top of the curve and make it like a square wave. That puts a lot of high frequency energy into the tweeter, and that might burn the tweeter. So if you amplifier is too small compared to what you are trying to do, you will damage your speakers. Based on that, a lot of people are saying you just need to make sure the amplifier is big enough and you'll never damage your speaker. And sadly, that's also not true. Because another thing that can damage the speaker is too much input power over time. If you drive the speaker very loud for a long period of time, it will get hot. So there's a limit to how hot can it actually get before the voice coil starts boiling, literally. That will happen even if it's unclipped input power. So if the input power is too high over a long period of time, you can still damage your speaker. And again, that's all controlled by the volume control. So the best way you can protect your speakers is to make sure you are handling the volume control diligently. If you can actually hear distortion, if you can hear something that doesn't sound right, turn the volume down. As long as you do that, you don't really have anything to worry about. It's very uncommon to damage something without hearing something wrong first. Make sure that everything sounds great and then your speakers are perfectly safe. That's it for today. Thank you for joining. See you next time.