I only turned it up for a minute!
Thermal Distortion your loudspeaker most likely suffers from it. But do you care?
Thermal Distortion is much more serious than just a maximum power handling limitation or side effect.TD is overlooked by most manufacturers as there is no easy (low cost) solution and TD is audible and measurable most of the time at most power levels. TD is caused by the conductive metal (aluminum, copper, or silver) voice coil getting hotter when you pass electrical energy through it. The more power you pass through it the hotter the metal gets. The hotter the metal gets the more the electrical resistance increase. The efficiency goes down and you need to ram in more and more power for smaller and smaller increases in SPL. It can be the reason you get fatigued while listening. If you are running massive power you are creating more TD in your transducers. But do you care? And is it a reason some prefer horn-loaded designs or SET-powered systems since they have the least problems with TD?
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@johnk actually I am going to walk back may earlier post. If the crossover or other electronics in a planer speaker are not suffering compression, then it is entirely reasonable for you to have mentioned it. so it’s a sage post, apologies sir. |
Crossover components most certainly can get hot enough for thermal compression to be an issue. A friend of mine who repairs gear showed me a couple of inductors he took out of a pair of speakers that where played at a really high volume level. Remarkably, the drivers were not blown, but the plastic formers for the inductors completely melted--what was left was a spool of wire sitting in a pool of plastic.
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- 81 posts total