"David Looser" wrote in
message
"Engineer" wrote

I think it's only the tweeters that are wrecked by
cheap, clipping amplifiers

It is. When an amplifier is driven into clipping the
high-order harmonics increase significantly and can
damage the tweeter. This is no myth, it has happened many
times.

This is at least partially a myth. The fact of the matter is that very few
people know exactly what happens when a tweeter fails because to know this,
you'd have to instrument the situation and sacrifice at least one tweeter.

The fact of the matter that there is a lot of music that actually has its
high frequency content *decreased* when it is clipped.

The one thing that is sure is that speakers fail when too much power is
applied to them for too long. One way to facilitate this is to use a larger
power amplifier.

Bullet-proof speaker protection is difficult because a
high amplitude short duration overload can damage the
speaker mechanically, whilst a sustained high-level
signal, well within the speaker's mechanical limits, can
cause thermal overload.

Agreed.

The answer is to always keep the volume setting below
that at which audible distortion is present!

Also agreed.