Bloated Sales Propaganda encountered PYLE 350 Watt RMS Tweeter

Thread Starter

N11778

Joined Dec 4, 2015
176
This is the Bloated'est :) I have found so far 350 Watts RMS 700 Peak PYLE Driver Tweeter.
I Burned it up with a Heathkit 60 watt Audio Amp. (Heathkit did not lie back then it puts out a bit more)
See attached picture. How can that tinny voice coil (end of pencil) dissipate 350 watts RMS.
I bought another one, took it apart tested the voice coil.
It started to overheat at 3 watts RMS 18,000 Khz.

I read about audio on several sites and most say the manufactures pick numbers just for sales.
others say they pick the watts on how much the speaker weighs, some just randomly.

This one weighs 3.5 lbs = 350 watt Lbs. or 100 Watts Per Pound or 700 Peak Watt Pounds (PWP).

Oh and in the Features on the side of the box they say it puts out 112 db.
Well guess what, it does put out 112 db and at 3 watts RMS guess they did not want to lie
about something a customer can test with a $60 meter in their pocket !

I wrote to them and they said something about the sun,
and I had done something wrong that's the correct wattage.

Define a: bit 20% :) :)
Sparky
 

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MrSoftware

Joined Oct 29, 2013
2,188
The cheaper brands of audio equipment are well known for just picking numbers out of the sky. Watch this all the way to the end (at least FF to 3:00 and 5:40):

 
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Thread Starter

N11778

Joined Dec 4, 2015
176
The cheaper brands of audio equipment are well known for just picking numbers out of the sky. Watch this all the way to the end (at least FF to 3:00 and 5:40):

It did better than the PYLE DRIVER the PYLE only did 1% of rated power
thank you for the laughs I got from the video. It helped a little.
:):):):):):):):):)
Sparky
 

crutschow

Joined Mar 14, 2008
34,285
I'm being charitable, but they could be trying to say that it will tolerate 350W music power when connected in a system with the proper high frequency crossover. :rolleyes:
There's not a lot of high frequency energy in music so even with 350W of music power into the system the high frequency power may only be a few watts (less than the 3W it needs for 112dB output).
 

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
I'm being charitable,
You surely are!

The art of obfuscation is one of the things I hate vividly when it is used to cheat people, and it usually is.:mad:
Pyle might not have actually lied, but they successfully mislead their prospective customers.
That's how they earn responses like post #4 (mcgyvr).
 

blocco a spirale

Joined Jun 18, 2008
1,546
Tweeter power ratings are always stated when used as part of a system, at a particular crossover frequency and roll-off for a limited duration; any loudspeaker will fail quickly if subject to a full power sine wave continuously.

In normal use, only a very small fraction of the amplifiers power is fed to the tweeter. It should be obvious that a low-frequency transducer requires far more power than a high-frequency transducer.

How big do you think the tweeter voice coil would need to be if it were actually rated at 350W? Look at the size of voice coil on a 350W low-frequency driver, would it be possible to build a tweeter with a voice coil of that size and mass?

If you insist on thinking of loudspeakers in the way you might think of electric motors, lightbulbs or heaters you will end up destroying a lot of perfectly good loudspeakers.

http://www.doctorproaudio.com/doctor/temas/powerhandling.htm
Notice that none of the tests involve feeding the speaker with a sine wave at full power until smoke comes out of it.
 
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Thread Starter

N11778

Joined Dec 4, 2015
176
Music Power what the ____ is music power.
But thanks anyway. I think I know why I'm only getting 35 to 40 watts from my 100 Watt solar panels.
I was using regular watts instead of Solar Watts my bad.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Back in the early to mid 90's when I was in high school and college I did a lot for work on people car audio systems and seeing amplifier designs like this and far worse near daily event for me.

A few of the more outrageous scam designs I saw took their power ratings and how they got them way further than this. One odd off brand amplifier I worked on was size and ratings but all it had was one ~3" square circuit board for the actual audio amplifier circuitry and a set of big resistors that came on through a relay when powered up that didn't do anything but make sure the thing drew lots of power and got real hot!

Supposedly all "Class A circuitry for purest sound" or something like that being technically Class A audio amplifiers did draw a lot of power all the time regardless of actual audio output and by design that one did draw a huge amount of power all the time while doing nothing.

Another one used a similar approach with a near identical amplifier board but added a 555 based PWM driver and power transistor control to the big resistors so that it would make the vehicle's lights dim with the music like it was putting some serious wattage out to the speakers!

Rather clever ways to disguise common 10 - 15 watt audio amplifiers as high powered multi hundred watt units. They sure looked and acted their part on the input power requirements and related effects but they were still just small cheap crap units where it counted. :rolleyes:
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
There's no such thing as "watts RMS" -- there is average power and there is peak power (and possibly other types of power depending on what is being communicated), but RMS power is nonsensical.

The notion of "music power" is both an advertising gimmick and a legitimate consideration. The concept here is that typical music content almost always contains very brief segments in which signal levels are WAY above the average levels (think something like big cymbal crashes). These events are usually a fraction of a second in duration and so no appreciable heating occurs because the total excess energy delivered is very small. So in order to avoid clipping or excessive distortion, the system needs to be able to handle very high peak power levels that are well beyond anything it could handle for a sustained period of time (perhaps even as brief as ten seconds or so). Hence the term "music power" was coined to really refer to "peak power" (I don't know if it was coined by engineering or marketing). But the marketing people sure latched onto it and routinely use it as the advertised rating for the system, knowing full damn well that the overwhelming majority of people are going to think of it as the average acoustical power that the system can deliver.
 

Raygl

Joined Dec 3, 2016
10
My favorite bloated specs was back in the 70s when boom boxes were big. The speck probably was close to real but they gave it in mille watts. to fool the average consumer. Like wow I got a music box with 3000 mille watts, that is huge.
 

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
There's no such thing as "watts RMS"
I think you need to clarify that you are talking about something audio, but I'm not sure exactly what.
In a different conversation, 120 VAC RMS x 10 amps = 1200 watts RMS. That's what my toaster oven does.:p

My preference in amplifier ratings is the RMS watts that can be produced by the available power supply voltage applied to the load impedance. That's because I can do the math from there. I know that music typically has peaks of about 10X the average power being delivered to the load. I know that typical music will have to be averaging a lot less than the maximum RMS watts available or it's going to be mostly distortion. If I know the RMS Watts (which apparently don't exist) I know what to do with that number.

The more the marketers invent new terms, the less I like it. "The Instantaneous High Frequency Peak power doesn't mean much to me. I say, "How many watts can this thing deliver continuously?" In a guitar amplifier, that actually happens when the musician has his amplifier turned up to eleven and plays the acoustics of the room.:cool: In that scenario, IHFP doesn't mean anything to me.:(

If all amplifiers were labeled in (one particular method), they would all be on equal footing for comparison purposes.
I prefer RMS watts.

A simple minded example from what I saw in a grocery store: Five different brands of liquid kitchen soap labeled in five different ways. Cents per ounce, dollars per pint, sheckles per dram. Eventually I realized they were all 12 ounce bottles priced at $1.98o_O
The only reason for the grocery store to use different labels for each brand was to obfuscate the value. That's how I perceive marketing tools applied to amplifiers.
 

tcmtech

Joined Nov 4, 2013
2,867
Back in my days of playing with this stuff my rule of thumb was with a dedicated honest rated amplifier that had a THD of less than 1 at 25 - 50 watts and a good efficient high SPL rated speaker was plenty for tweeters.
For mid range 100 - 200 was ear bleeding loud.
For bass and subwoofers, screw it. If it wasn't powered by a nuclear reactor it wasn't pushing enough watts! :D
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
I think you need to clarify that you are talking about something audio, but I'm not sure exactly what.
In a different conversation, 120 VAC RMS x 10 amps = 1200 watts RMS. That's what my toaster oven does.:p
120 VAC RMS x 10 A into a resistive load is 1200 watts (or 1200 watts, average). Period. There is no such thing as watts RMS. It is completely nonsensical to talk about the root of the mean of the square of power and, if you DID, then you would NOT get the power that you want. You want AVERAGE power. In general, if the load has any net reactance, you will have both positive and negative instantaneous power. If you calculated RMS this would make these indistinguishable, which is not what you want. Even with a purely resistive load, the RMS calculation will yield a result that is too big because it will weight higher power levels quadratically more heavily than lower power levels. Do the math. If you calculate the RMS value of p(t) for a 120 VAC RMS voltage across a 12 Ω resistor you will give an RMS power of about 1470 W.

RMS is one particular way of getting a single number from a time-varying waveform. For voltage and current waveforms, it yields a number that, if applied to a resistive load, produces the same power as would a DC waveform of that same constant value would.

But the single number that you normally want for a time-varying power waveform is the average. Or you might want peak. Or you might want something else. I can't think of a single instance in which you would want RMS. It has no physical meaning whatsoever.

If all amplifiers were labeled in (one particular method), they would all be on equal footing for comparison purposes.
Would they? If all you knew was that one amplifier was rated at 1000 W and another was rated at 1200 W, with the stipulation that the rating used was identical in both cases, do you really know enough to compare those two amplifiers? If the 1000 W amplifier starts clipping at 10 kW peak power but the 1200 W amplifier started clipping at 1300 W, which one would you rather use to deliver 500 W of acoustic power?

I prefer RMS watts.
You prefer average power, you just don't realize it. You know the concept you mean, you are just using an improper label for it.

A simple minded example from what I saw in a grocery store: Five different brands of liquid kitchen soap labeled in five different ways. Cents per ounce, dollars per pint, sheckles per dram. Eventually I realized they were all 12 ounce bottles priced at $1.98o_O
The only reason for the grocery store to use different labels for each brand was to obfuscate the value. That's how I perceive marketing tools applied to amplifiers.
I agree with the grocery store comparison pricing being infuriating, though I don't think it's to obfuscate the value. Don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence. Some unit of measure has to be used and which unit makes sense varies from one product to another; for most products, there are several reasonable units to use. Hence someone, somewhere has to make that decision. Unfortunately, that is done by different people at different times, usually without bothering to look at the unit of measure used by similar products. Instead, they pick what they think makes the most sense at the time they enter the item into the database. The people managing the data don't see the items on the shelf and so don't get smacked with the inconsistency. The people stocking the shelves may or may not notice the inconstancies, but they have no control over them even if they did. It wouldn't be too hard to devise a way for stockers to easily tag items electronically that are inconsistently shown at the same time that they are taking inventory, but it would still slow that process down and most managers won't see the benefit as outweighing the cost.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
13,086
120 VAC RMS x 10 A into a resistive load is 1200 watts (or 1200 watts, average). Period. There is no such thing as watts RMS. It is completely nonsensical to talk about the root of the mean of the square of power and, if you DID, then you would NOT get the power that you want. You want AVERAGE power. I
It's D all over again.

https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/power-of-audio-power-amps.102780/page-2#post-991634
https://forum.allaboutcircuits.com/threads/some-basic-audio-questions.97771/
 

#12

Joined Nov 30, 2010
18,224
There is no such thing as watts RMS. It is completely nonsensical to talk about the root of the mean of the square of power
I see. It's your math education running rampant. As if everybody else in the world is going to look at, "RMS watts" and never guess the amplifier has exactly the available power they think it has. They are all going to go, "Duh. There's no such a thing. What are the watts RMS?"

This Thread is about propaganda and deception. That means specifications that obscure the truth, not misused labels that mean the same thing to over 99% of the population.

But thanks for typing a thousand words about Audio 101. Would you like to shift gears to Audio 102 and school me about the rated load impedance and the distortion level the power is measured at, or did you already do that?
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
29,979
If you want to use meaningless labels because you are too lazy to use them properly because you know what you mean and you expect everyone else in the world to know what you mean, fine. I can't stop you. But I can try to inform other people as to the proper use of these labels so that they don't follow your bad example. Having seen people write code to calculate RMS watts the wrong way precisely because they called it RMS watts and so used the root-mean-square algorithm to calculate RMS watts, I see value in people using terminology correctly as much as possible.
 
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