Why do speakers die?
There are two causes of speaker failure – electrical and mechanical. Electric damage is usually due to excessive heat in the voice coil. This is why a 10 watt speaker can last for a long time when driven by a 50 watt amp under certain conditions (i.e., time to cool off as occurs with very clean sine wave signals). Mechanical failure occurs when the suspension is compromised by the stroke of the piston action (excursion) exceeding design limits. This condition is interactive with electrical as it takes a given quantity of power and frequency to cause a speaker to jump that far. Point is it is not as simple as matching “rated output” with “rated handling”. First of all it is very important to realize that wattage is not static. The output of your amp is not a steady tone and when it is driven into clipping at some point the rise time is so fast it is difficult to discern it from a square wave, representing many attributes of a much larger output. Simply put, wattage is at best a guidelin
