Remember this old JBL Pro white paper? http://www.jblpro.com/catalog/suppor...=246&doctype=3
I always thought it flawed because it warns against, amongst other things, tweeters blowing out from clipped waveforms. Bipolar transistor amps I could see doing this, but tubes don't clip like that. So if you turn it way up and the tweeters blow anyway, what is doing it? This 1991 Rane paper wants us to believe another answer, and it makes sense to me. http://www.hotsound.com.br/clipping_effects.pdf Why would using a more powerful amp help? Because clipping is not destroying anything. Power is, through compression of the lower frequency output. It is when turning up the amp has insufficient energy to increase woofer loudness - but beau coup to feed more and more energy to the tweeters. If the amp is big enough, poof. Oddly, it means a tiny amp would lack the power to kill the tweeters, but a bigger amp could.
A properly sized amp, by JBL standards, would not because the lower frequencies, indeed all frequencies, would keep getting louder. The theory is the listener would cry Uncle before the energy was sufficient to fry the tweeters. But it has little to do with the quality of the signal, just the quantity.
Makes sense to me, how about you? Unrelated, I find this page to be very interesting. It is an almost zero BS take on amplification, listening, design and common sense sound engineering. All in the service of elucidating Gainclone amps. http://www.adx.co.nz/techinfo/audio/gainclone1.htm I enjoyed every word.