Can you ever have too powerful amp for speakers?

Most speaker damage occurs during an event called 'clipping'. This happens when you overdrive an underpowered amp. It's much harder to damage a speaker when using clean power. So if your speakers are rated 80-100 wpc, a 50 wpc amp has a much higher chance of damaging your speakers than a 300 wpc amp.

If you have smaller minimonitors and play records... those big amps can bottom out the woofs with record warp or transient kick drum hits (happened to me). So... easy does it.

usually its power amps with poor designed power supplies that cause the most damage to speakers...

300 watts on 100W speakers is ideal; plenty of clean headroom. I've sometimes gone as much as 5 to 1. Only throwing all common sense out the window (regarding drive levels) would cause any problems. Go for it!

It's obviously more "dangerous" than having the recommended power amp rating. While common sense user practices can prevent most mishaps, there are circumstances beyond the user's control. Here's two:

- A short term power outage can turn your system off and then on. If that happens your preamp could send out a transient pulse that could easily fry your speaker's voice coils.

- Your neighbor has a heart attack and your street is quickly crowded with emergency responders. Suddenly bursts of radio chatter come through your system...and then silence.

The above people saying there won't be any problems are not being completely accurate.