What is severe clipping?
Now that you know about clipping (see above) we move to severe clipping (a.k.a square wave). It always amazes me when I hear some idiot driving down the road and the audio is clearly distorted (you know what I mean). Many people drive their amplifiers into what could be called a square wave output (white line below). When an amplifier is pushed that hard, it is actually possible to drive the speaker with twice as much power as the amplifier can cleanly produce into the speaker. As you can see below, the yellow sine wave is the maximum ‘clean’ output that the amp can produce. When an amplifier is pushed way too hard, the signal will eventually look like the white line. The effective voltage of the white line is ~1.414 x the yellow line. This means the total power driven into the speaker by the clipped (square wave) signal is double the power delivered by the ‘clean’ signal (yellow line). This means that the power is double but the cooling of the voice coil will not increase in proportio
