Dumb Quest : Amp Clips Or Speakers Blow Up First?

Great post, Shadorne. This issue is one reason why its hard to duplicate actual live music levels at home; it just dounds like crap and your ears beg for mercy unless as you put it, you have a rare uncompressed recording and a system that can reproduce those dynamic peaks.

Shadorne, a slight correction regarding your statement

The "perceptive loudness" effect is what is often used on modern pop CD's, whereby the waveforms are deliberately clipped in the recording/mastering process in order to create a "loud" sounding CD

In fact, I believe that these CD's are compressed, so that the dynamic range may be as little as 6 dB's, so that it sounds "louder"...this is a common trick for TV commercials. Limiters would be used to actually "clip" a very dynamic waveform, but are used more for radio broadcasting than recording.

Thanks for all responses. Shadorne, actually what I meant by the line 'when my ears fail first' is that my ears cannot take the sound pressure anymore although I can still crank up the volume. The music is already very loud and if I turn up the volume further it's not the equipment or speakers that would blow first but my ear drums would! This is due to the fact that my listening room is quite small, and if I were to place the system in a larger room I am sure I can still turn up the volume higher with/without going into clipping.

I would agree that nearfield monitors can't play too loud as they have their limitations in their design. However, I find the PMC's are able to go louder and deeper without showing any distortion whereas the N805's seem to lose it a bit. THe PMC's can really go loud and still stay clean at complex musical passages, and although I was tempted to test it to the limits, my ears tell me to stop due to room limitations. Got to be the transmission line thing. I highly doubt it's due to 'perceptive loudness' in my case.

Let me pass on an experience I had regarding McIntosh amps. I hooked up a MAC 602, which is 600wpc, to a couple of little Cambridge bookshelf speakers and cranked it up just to see if their Power Guard and Sentry Monitor technology would work... and it worked perfectly.

Fatparrot,

Thanks - you were right to correct me. Indeed, it would be more accurate to say "deliberately compressed" than "deliberately clipped". Not so many are actually hard clipped. The majority of modern pop CD's are "soft limited", which clips the peaks in a rounded fashion (meaning that the peaks above a certain level are limited in a gentle manner in order to reduce the dynamic range).

However, excessive compression due to "soft limiting" or hard clipping will tend to sound the same anyway....harsh, loud and distorted at the end of the day excessive soft limiting becomes the shape of a squared of sine wave too.