high powered amp into wimpy speakers

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hello,

i'm helping a fixed installation situation get better over time. they
don't have money to do it all at once.

i want to get a crown 800 power amp, and run it into their existing
speakers. their speakers are wimpy and not used to seeing more than
100 watts.

so i'm hoping i can just keep the amp turned down low until more
powerful speakers can be installed.

will that be ok?

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

> If you put in a bigger signal ( such as drive the mix harder ) then you
> still get the full watts. It's *not* a 'power control'.

Put a resistive pad on the outputs, perhaps? If you waste most of the
wattage in heat...

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In article <1117236043.528595.174100@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com> genericaudioperson@hotmail.com writes:

> i want to get a crown 800 power amp, and run it into their existing
> speakers. their speakers are wimpy and not used to seeing more than
> 100 watts.
>
> so i'm hoping i can just keep the amp turned down low until more
> powerful speakers can be installed.
>
> will that be ok?

Sure. The knobs always go down. Rememer, though, that when more
"powerful" speakers are installed, you'll have the potential to make
it too loud. Be careful. You may not ruin the speakers, but you might
lose your audience.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers (mrivers@d-and-d.com)
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me here: double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

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In theory this should work but consider what happens when a signal
gound is lost and 800 Watts of 60 Hz. line noise is applied to the
speakers. Uncontrolled feedback could be fatal also.

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genericaudioperson@hotmail.com wrote:

> there's little danger of someone turning up the knobs. the amp is in a
> large locked cabinet, with a master power kill switch outside the
> cabinet.

Lucky, 'cos if there's DJ around..... ! ;-)

I once came across a situation where a DJ had selected 'bridged' on an amp
( without making any of the other necessary adjustments ) as he'd heard it
made the sound louder. The out of phase bass in the left and right channels
was what caused the venue owners to ask me to come and check out the 'odd
sound'.

There's kids out there who truly don't even have half or even a quarter of
a clue.

Graham

Archived from groups: rec.audio.pro (More info?)

Too true. And every DJ or musician thinks they are a sound engineer by
default.

You could offer the venue owner a job though - phase mis-alignment
isn't the easiest thing in the world to hear (in my experience about
75% of people can't even hear it).

In answer to the original question though - you say the speakers are
"used to seeing" about 100watts - is this per speaker, and if so how
many are there?

Crown have a tendency to power rate their amps at 2ohm impedance loads,
where *most* speakers are 8ohm. this would translate to roughly
400watts, split into 2 8 ohm speakers, so about 200watts per speaker,
which is not a bad power rating for a 100watt rated speaker (most
speakers can handle transients up to twice or 3 times their RMS spec -
the thing that destroys speakers more quickly than anything is
distortion which you are more likely to get with an underpowered amp -
or a mentally challenged DJ who thinks red lights are pretty).

Of course, if there are 2 or more speakers for each channel, you could
also connect them in series instead of paralell, giving a 16ohm load at
the amp output instead of 4, and another drop in the total power.)

BUT - as I said, the thing that will destroy your speakers is
distortion (you can burn out the coils by overpowering too, but
distortion is much more of a problem), and distortion is most likely to
be introduced before the signal ever hits the amplifier. Keeping the
amp turned down can limit this to some extent, but best practice would
be to educate the people using the equipment (mostly DJ's I assume),
and impress on them the benefits of unity gain (0db signal levels) from
their DJ mixer. I find a stick with a few nails in it to be the best
method generally...:-)