When selecting speakers, it’s common for people to just look at maximum power handling, and many manufacturers make a point of specifying seemingly unbelievable power handling capacity of 1000W or more. Its quite rare for manufacturers to specify power compression though, and it seems to be often overlooked by system designers.
It seems that loudspeakers to handle what appear to be insanely high levels of power compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Has there been some amazing technological breakthrough? Do we need to re-write the physics text books? No, it’s still just basic physics – so what are the changes?
Firstly, modern materials used in the construction of voice coils are able to withstand significantly higher temperatures before failing. Why is this important? Well Cone loudspeakers are in fact very inefficient, with even the best transducers only converting around 5% of the electrical energy supplied into sound, the majority of the remainder is converted into heat. So a 1000W bass speaker running at full power may well be converting only 50W into acoustic power, and 950W of heat. Thats like having a 1kw bar heater in your bassbin! That’s a lot of heat, which can cause big problems.
Aside from improving construction materials, manufacturers are also refining designs to maximise heat transfer away from the voice oil, this also contributes to the increases in power handling capacity we are experiencing.
What’s all this got to do with power compression?
Enabling speakers to handle much higher temperatures might seem a good thing, as it increases maximum power handling, but it also has a detrimental effect. Most voice coils are made from copper or aluminium wire, both of which have a positive temperature co-efficient of around 0.4% per °C. What’s the significance of that? You will have heard of superconductors, which operate at extremely low temperatures in order to try to reduce and minimise resistance. Loudspeaker voice coils unfortunately work in the opposite way: as the temperature increases, the resistance also increases.
A modern state of the art voice coil is designed to withstand extremely high temperatures, often operating at up to 3000C or more when driven at full power. 0.4% may sound insignificant, but remember this is per °C – at only 2300C the voice coil DC resistance has almost doubled which causes the voice coil impedance to increase accordingly. Some simple maths and you can quickly see that the increase in temperature can make your 8 ohm speaker start behaving more like a 16 ohm speaker.
So after setting your sound system carefully at the start of the night, an hour in, and it doesn’t sound as loud – you might wonder whats going on. Two things: firstly, your ears have a self defence mechanism: there are 2 tiny muscles in the middle ear that will contract when the ear is exposed to loud sounds. This contraction will reduce the loudness of the sounds reaching the inner ear, thereby protecting the inner ear against exposure to loud noises. This isn’t power compression, but it’s something to be aware of, as you may well be tempted to turn up the volume, I know from experience that a typical DJ will certainly try this, and end up running his mixer into overdrive in the attempt to get more volume.
The second factor is power compression, a typical loudspeaker can lose 3-6 dB of volume once power compression kicks in.
You could think of power compression a bit like the aerodynamics of driving a car. When you start moving, a certain level of power from your engine sets you hurtling forwards at high speed, but as you go faster, wind resistance increases, so you stop accelerating. You need to apply more power to increase speed, but wind resistance keeps increasing too, so you have to apply even more power.
If your amplifiers have headroom, your instincts will make you want to turn them up, to restore the original volume level. To some extent this will work, if you’re familiar with the maths, you’ll see whats going on. Your 8 ohm speaker at room temperature happily accepts 1000W from your amplifier, and gradually reaches an operating temperature of say 250°C. Your resistance has doubled, and your ‘new’ 16 ohm speaker will probably only be receiving around 500W from your amplifier. In a way, as the speaker reaches temperature, it ‘protects itself’ by reducing the power it is operating at, stopping it getting any hotter. If it were to cool a little, the power would increase again, causing it to heat up.
Lets suppose you turn the gain up on your amplifiers, determined to try to push 1000W through your speakers. As you apply more power, you will generate more heat, perhaps reaching 350°C or more, with your speakers resistance continuing to increase to perhaps 20 or more ohms. Essentially you are fighting a losing battle, as you turn the gain up, the speaker fights back with a higher resistance. You will eventually reach a limit, either your amp will run out of headroom and you cant turn it any louder, or the other possibility, which happens all too often, is your speaker will overheat, and burn out causing catastrophic failure.
Now you know about power compression and the fact that speaker resistance increases with heat, you’ll probably realise that you actually have to push a speaker very hard in order to cause it fail – so if your speaker suddenly fails and you smell burning, the only person to blame is YOU, as you now know better than to try to fight power compression by applying more power.
Now consider what effect power compression will have. 3-6dB loss at full operating power is almost like switching off half your PA system. To achieve the same consistent volume you will need twice as many speakers!
What’s the solution? Either buy speakers with headroom, e.g. if you want to operate at around 500-600W, you might want to consider purchasing speakers rated at 800W or more. At 75% of rated power, the effects of power compression should be much less significant. Also, try to select speakers with improved cooling technology, that suffer less from power compression. Avoiding power compression could make your speakers twice as loud, meaning you could take half as many to the gig!
There are other side effects from the increased levels of heat in a speaker, T/S parameters can vary, bass can sound boomy and mid frequencies can sound muffled. For the best sound quality, its best to try to minimise power compression effects,