Overpowering Speakers

Tim, I sincerely appreciate your gentlemanly responses and your good intentions. However, I too feel a responsibility to separate fact from mis-information.

As someone with multiple electrical engineering degrees, and multiple decades of experience in electronics design, I can tell you that DC is not "seen as high frequency"; that a clipped audio waveform is not DC and is not seen as DC (as Blkadr correctly indicated, and contrary to what is stated in the article you quoted); and that the portion of a crossover network that is between the speaker terminals and the tweeter (which is designed to pass high frequencies and to block low frequencies, and may be simply a capacitor in series, or something that is similar at a simplified conceptual level but more elaborate) will block DC. DC is actually the LOWEST possible frequency, zero Hertz. Capacitors block DC, and impede low frequencies.

If DC is ABRUPTLY applied to a circuit, high frequency components may be briefly present, corresponding to the abruptness of the change in voltage. Those are referred to as transients. Similarly, the abrupt waveform changes I referred to in my earlier post, that occur when a LOW frequency waveform is clipped, contain HIGH frequency spectral components.

Which leads me to simply reiterate that my earlier post correctly explains why tweeters are commonly damaged by the clipped waveforms that can be generated by underpowered amps.

Best regards,
-- Al

Elizabeth is right on the money. Before in my 2 channel set up in my basement I had a Phase Linear 700B powering a pair of Tannoy bookshelf speakers that were rated up to 120 watts at 8 ohms. I was careful with the raising of the volume and listening level and had no issues. The music sounded fine and the speakers were not damaged. People thought I was crazy to use a Flame Linear or Fuzz Linear to power bookshelf speakers for a time but I just had to be careful.

Thanks for your kind response Almarg, Pulled my old Speaker
Craft notes out, here is what I had word for word. I'm just old.
The bulb wires in series with the tweeter, under normal average music conditions it is just a low value resistance as the power sent to the tweeter increases the current through the bulb increases. since the bulb filament has a positive temperature coefficient as it heats up it's resistance goes up and takes a larger share of the power that the tweeter would get without the bulb in series. this does cause compression but saves many tweeters in a cheap easy way. Ideally the bulb should go before the tweeter crossover circuitry so it does not affect the crossover frequency.