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Underpowering Headphones

C

clean_me

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 2, 2005
Messages
375
I picked up some HD650's and I haven't received my amp yet. Would it hurt them to plug em into my Z-6800 speaker pod? I know from car audio that its sometimes 'bad' to underpower speakers...well thats what I heard.
 
You cannot harm a speaker by underpowering it. If that was true then turning down the volume would harm your speaker.
 
Jake said:
You cannot harm a speaker by underpowering it. If that was true then turning down the volume would harm your speaker.
Click to expand...

QFT

Reducing the volume actually reduces the voltage at the speaker.
All analog sound ( the only kind that a speaker can reproduce, reguardless of speaker mfg claims ) is voltage differentials to a speaker. Reduce the min to max voltage deviation and you reduce the volume.

The thing about automobile speaker systems is that you are sending high wattage power to the speaker. (Watts = Volts X Amps)


For headphones and most PC speaker systems, the wattage is so low that it can't harm them.


 
Jake said:
You cannot harm a speaker by underpowering it. If that was true then turning down the volume would harm your speaker.
Click to expand...

Sure you can, if you turn up the gain/volume and push the amp into clipping it surely will fry the speaker. But yes, underpowering wont hurt it unless you do that.
 
tdg said:
Sure you can, if you turn up the gain/volume and push the amp into clipping it surely will fry the speaker. But yes, underpowering wont hurt it unless you do that.
Click to expand...
True. Clipping distortion is a speaker killer. More people have fried their drivers with under-powered amps than those who have amps much more powerful than the driver rating.
 
Pardon my ignorance, can you elaborate on clipping? I Really don't want to damage these headphones!
 
Clipping is when you push an amp too hard, to the point it simply can't produce enough output to match what it's being told to produce, so the amp has a momentary clip in output, causing a sag and spike in the output.

The reason I mention it is because when you connect a speaker to a underpowered amp, it won't play quite as loud as if it were connected to a higher output amp, so many people will bump up the volume, push the amp into clipping, and fried voice coil ensues.

But honestly don't worry about it, just keep your headphones at a reasonable volume, and you wont have any issues.
 
tdg said:
Sure you can, if you turn up the gain/volume and push the amp into clipping it surely will fry the speaker. But yes, underpowering wont hurt it unless you do that.
Click to expand...

See, just "underpowering" it doesn't do anything. You'd also have to do this with a speaker with less than twice the thermal wattage rating than your amp can put out RMS. Idiots with volume knobs blow speakers.

Say your amp nominally does 300W, and your speaker claims "400W power handling". If you are an idiot on the volume knob and end up clipping your amp's output, you can send nearly 600W of clipped signal to your speaker. A pure square wave has nearly 2 times the power as a sine wave.
 
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