speaker limiters

[The Real MC]

I use a Drawmer DL441 for the limiter in my system.

[agedhorse]

Originally Posted by dboomer

Well if highest performance is your goal then having an amplifier that can cleanly deliver the full peak power handling voltage of a speaker (or more) would be the goal. If you "size" your amps this way their built-in limiters will be effective peak limiters for the system and then adding some kind of limiter to limit the average power would be a very reasonable way to run a system. By recommending amplifiers with lower power you are trying to use their built-in limiters as averaging limiters, which is better than nothing but certainly not as good as it could be. As always, running at maximum performance levels required operating with maximum operating skills.

It's always a tradeoff between maximum performance and maximum reliability. If you plot the two curves (with common or normalized metrics), where they intersect is the point where you have the best of both worlds. For the average user, one without access to the performance and reliability data and without proper test equipment, processing and knowledge, it makes far more sense to give up the theoretical 3dB (more like 1.5dB in practice) of performance
for the (greatly) increased reliability.

Originally Posted by dboomer

As far as JBL PRX ... don't they use 1.4 ohm LF drivers in their powered systems? It's a 262f-1 woofer not a 2262 which has a bigger heatsink. If so again you don't have an apples to apples number to compare it to. I don't have much experience with the woofer. How big is the VC ... 2.5"? They supply 500W cont. (according to their spec) to the woofer and 500W to the tweeter (in a PRX612). So certainly the HF section has an amp that is more that what would be expected program power.

Going from memory, they use dual 2 ohm VC's, 3" dia for the 2265G 618XLF. For the 612 and 615 they use dual 1 ohm, 2.5" VC's wired in series so the LF amp delivers 500 watts into 2 ohms. That means the HF amp delivers ~150 watts into the 8 ohm HF driver maximum and it's limited way back under DSP control.

There is so much limiting available on the HF section and the bandwidth is such that any power argument is moot in the context of program or whatever. For the LF section, I would expect the continuous rating would be around 350-400 watts making 500 watts with procesisng a good and relatively conservative choice.

I also noticed in my book that JBL does not support the smaller drivers with recone kits, only the 2265. That is disturbing, and may pay into my suggestion that reliability/protection might be more robust to limit warranty impacts on Harman. Educated guess.