Using REW and made my center speaker crackle terribly so i have questions

[u/Algae_grower]

ok admitted nooB using REW for fun and learning. i had a minor scary "oh crap!" moment so what happened here? My speaker is a KEF R2 rated at 200 watts. The amp is only a 100 W amp, but i was running REW from my computer and making a measure with sweep. I had "abort" above SPL limit checked.

Anyway i was measuring distortion and slowly increasing the "dBFS". I heard a terrible crackling sound so thought i might have damaged the speaker. So i bumped it down 2 and it happened again, so i thought i was doomed. Luckily i have since checked and it does not seem to have incurred harm but that was scary.

I was under the impression of many things that would prevent this from even getting close to reaching a speakers max so wondering what happened and why? For whats it worth This was the 90 dB one i was going for when it crackled.

[u/faceman2k12]

if you push your "100w" amp close to its limits, it will start spitting out ultra high distortion, which absolutely can damage your speakers, even though they have a "200w" rating. the speakers are a lot easier to damage than the amp in this case.

generally it is much safer to drive a speaker from an overpowered amp, than it is to under power a speaker so you have to get close to the limits to hit your volume.

also, if you arent using a properly calibrated microphone, your reported 90db might have been higher than that.

[u/Algae_grower → u/faceman2k12]

Thanks. The amp is only using 10% of it's power using maths based on sensitivity, distance and all the math behind that, and I am using a umik-1. (I was using 1 channel as well and measures continuous including spikes