throwaway789657

Do you know where I could learn about the unreliability and downsides of what I'm suggesting? Somehow all of the other electronic gear I own is tolerant of anything short of a lightning strike (and for that, there's surge protectors, which are not that expensive). I'd love to learn more about why speakers aren't the same.

I'm curious. Can you say more about why?

So if I turn the knob on my a/v receiver all the way up, my speakers won't blow out? I'm obviously not going to try it, but my understanding is that they would get damaged. To prevent this, I set a maximum volume on the receiver's settings to the loudest I'm practically interested in, given the size of the room and such. But that probably means I'm capping my volume a good bit below the guaranteed safe level, which only the speaker manufacturer is really in a position to know.

If you have your own receiver and your own speakers--a home stereo system, not a PC speaker system--it is just a matter of turning the nob too high to blow them out. With all these wifi-connected receivers these days, I bet if your laptop is compromised, a hacker could turn up the volume and physically damage your speakers. Anyone inside your wifi can cause many thousands of dollars (or whatever your speakers cost) of physical damage. Wow!

So this poor reliability is just rampant in the sound industry? Unless there is some reason why such a circuit is not feasible without, e.g., decreasing sound quality. Which is the kind of thing my original question is asking about.

In no other high-end consumer product would that unreliability be tolerated. Why would you ever run your speakers at a volume that might blow them out depending on what the next bar of the song sounds like? Are you pre-screening every single bit of audio that will get played over your speakers? Otherwise, you should never run speakers at a borderline volume. This protection should be built in to the speaker. No matter how much volume you feed into a speaker, it should not break.

(Of course, you could feed always feed such an absurd amount of power that it would break even the protective circuits, but that ultimate vulnerability is just inherent in the nature of electronics).

Why don't all speakers have some circuitry that blocks any signal that could blow out the speakers? This has always seemed like an absurd state of affairs. It should not be possible to damage speakers by turning the volume too loud.