Query for Reconing Techs

In your experience, when drivers are fried, which is the most common cause: amps clipping or thermal overload/excessive excursion?

OK thank you. My subs are rated 600w (8R) and the power amps are (allegedly) 700w per channel. They work quite well together but the amps peak too much and I am concerned about possible sine wave damage. (I don't think they are outputting 700w, even at peak) I'm wondering if I will get better results, and if it will be better for the equipment to run in bridge mode coupling two subs in parallel per amp. The alleged output bridged is 2900w into 4R, obviously too high at 1450w per cab, but I'm thinking if I keep the input level sensible, this mode of operation might be better for both amps and drivers. Assuming no more than 1200w per cab as a result of optimistic marketing and keeping the input level low, as far as I know that is about right for amp-power-to-driver ratio.

Funktion One have a very simple Limiter Calculator on their website that may help you 

VECTORDJ wrote: The REAL Power Handling of a Woofer is Pink Noise for an extended Time (RMS).....

You are describing "Program" there. RMS would be a continuous signal such as a sine wave.

No, and once you start getting into it it becomes harder to explain because the old style power ratings were based on essentially arbitrary figures and not very accurately named to boot!

Essentially the old term "RMS" means "low crest factor signal" where the peak to RMS amplitude ratio is incredibly small. It's also been intended to mean things like "continuous power" or "average power". It never had a unified standard for how it was measured or what it meant but if you take it to mean "you can feed the speaker a sine wave of this power and it will be safe" then you're usually not far wrong with it.

Meanwhile pink noise has a crest factor of 4 meaning that the peak amplitude of the signal is +12dB greater than the RMS (Root Mean Square) amplitude of the signal. This gives you a signal that behaves more like music in terms of it's amplitude whilst the "pink" part of it means that the energy is equally distributed per octave (meaning 20-40Hz has the same amount of energy in pink noise as the 200-400Hz band does). This also better represents a music signal compared to a sine wave which has *all* of it's energy at one frequency.

There's a reason all the reputable manufacturers have moved over to the AES standard for loudspeaker power rating