trying to understand power...

[weltersys]

Cerwin Vega "cheated" a bit

The woofers are rated 300 RMS but the entire speaker was "sound reinforcement" rated 200 watts. The only issue I ever had was letting the village idiot borrow them and the DDT light engaged constantly with the heavy handed drummer. The woofers held but a midrange compression driver died.

Sold the CS1000 quickly after I gave up the PA life--57 pounds of iron is not fun to lug around.

It would be nice if the mega-buck receivers would have at least a clip light or indications of a soft-clip, current limiter or output limiter is engaging. The displays will give stock quotes but not tell you what the amplifiers are doing. The center channel is about as close as you can get to a PA speaker so it would be nice to know if getting up to the limits during movies. I've padded the tweeter down and have an auto-resetting thermal breaker inline with it as an attempt at protection. 30mm voice coils, ferro-fluid and magnet heatsinks can only go so far. 🙁

Hey old man, the CS 1000 was only 53 pounds for 550 watts per channel at 4 ohms. Of course, in a rack it was heavier..
Compared to a Macintosh 2300 at 128 pounds it was a featherweight ;^).

Amazing that the new SpeakerPower SP1-4000 can put out 4000 watts and weighs only 7 pounds.

As far as an indicator for your tweeter, the right light bulb in series won't much affect the sound, but will illuminate over a certain voltage, protecting and showing the protection at the same time.

Or you could buy the meters from my old Yamaha P 2200 if you are clever enough to figure out how to hook them up to your amp.

Art

 

[18Hurts]

The light bulb trick!

My JBL ProIII little monitor speakers used those--the port would "glow" as a heads up.

The CS1000 then lead to a DPC1000 12 pound Class D amp. It was fun but those 18 rack space racks with 3 amps, processors, XO's, limiters, power conditioners and the like became a literal pain.

Thanks for the offer on the power meters--my Carver has them but the Onkyo receiver is not "worthy". It is 12 years old and on my mental replacement schedule in the next few years as it moves from HT to garage amp.

One option I can go is use a HT receiver with pre-amp outs feeding a Crown or QSC 4 channel for L-C-R and the receiver can run the surrounds.

The garage Onkyo will use the light bulb trick on the tweeter, thanks Art.