Sometimes you just want to turn your speakers off loud
and jam out, right? Am I right? But have you ever noticed that they'll sometimes crackle
or sound distorted if you start really pushing the volume? This is a phenomenon called clipping.
And unlike that thing that you do to your nails, sometimes if you're actually being hygienic,
this is something you never want to happen. But why the heck does it happen?
So here's what's going on. Speakers are powered by amplifiers,
which send a voltage to your speaker drivers that make them vibrate in a certain way,
thereby producing sounds that you can enjoy. Amplifiers obviously need power and lots of them,
especially ones inside mainstream consumer electronics like phones and powered speakers
that you can just plug into the wall have built-in power supplies that can only provide so much juice.
I mean, try driving a pair of huge floor-standing speakers
with a tiny headphone amp and see how far you get.
Now, exactly how much power your amplifier will need
to produce a certain sound will depend on what the sound is.
Louder sounds think heavy drum beats or a singer forcefully hitting those high notes
or cymbals being fanged together. Oh, not those ones, these ones.
Those require more energy than other noises. If the energy required by the audio signal
is more than your amp can handle because its power supply is too weak,
clipping is the result. The reason it's called clipping
is that if you plug your setup into an oscilloscope, you can see the signals that have a high amplitude,
meaning that they require a lot of power, are clipped off with the result being
that the waveform will be flat on top because the high power signals couldn't be amplified enough.
So in place of the higher power portions of the audio track,
you instead get distortions and crackling since the actual signal isn't reaching your speakers
as intended and clipping isn't just annoying to your ears.
It can actually damage your speakers. When clipping occurs, amplifiers often end up pushing
too much high frequency energy to your speakers, meaning that the tweeter, the part responsible
for producing higher sounds is especially at risk
for permanent damage if there's lots of clipping present.
Some speakers have limiting circuits built in to prevent damage from clipping,
but even if your speakers aren't at risk, you don't want your audio to sound terrible.
So how do you avoid clipping? The easiest and most obvious way to do this
is to just turn down the volume. This will prevent the load on your amplifier's power supply
from getting too high, specifically if you are using a smaller or cheaper set of speakers
or a gadget that simply can't handle high power. But let's say you're using a more elaborate setup
where you're buying components like speakers and amplifiers separately.
Your best bet here is to find a set of speakers that can produce the volume you want,
often listed as the sound pressure level, and then choosing an amplifier and power supply
that can provide more than the listed power requirements
of the speaker. Also be sure to check out the impedance rating
of both your speakers and your amps and be sure that they're matched up.
Ratings are often given as a range. So as long as there's some overlap, you should be good to go.
And pro tip, if you're trying to fine tune, especially your car audio,
you can actually hook up an oscilloscope, play a test tone, and see at what level
the amplifier starts clipping the waveform, meaning you can just turn down the gain on the amp
until the waveform looks good at whatever specific volume you want to be your max.
This way your speakers won't clip, no matter what you're playing, and you won't damage them or your ears.
Of course, if you don't want to do all this, you can just listen to AirPods,
but don't turn those up too loud either because they just sound bad.
I said it. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, give us a thumbs up,
hit subscribe, and be sure to hit us up in the comment section with your suggestions
for topics that we should cover in the future.