RTI A7 power handling

audion3wb

Ok, so I bought my RTI setup about 8 months ago I think. I got A7 mains A3 surrounds and a CSIA6 center. I was powering this all with an onkyo 705 for a while and was a little underwhelmed with the output of my 2 channel listening. I since purchased an Emotiva UPA-7 which gives me 170 watts in 2 channel mode and that made them shake my house when turned up. They moved SOOOO much air I could feel it blasting out of both ports just like a subwoofer would. If I tried turning them up all the way I found things got a little harsh after a certain point so Im left wondering.... How much power these things can really handle?

I find it hard to beleive that my amp was clipping since it has great power handling capabilities, and I recall reading someone saying that around 150wpc rms is as much as these guys can handle. Has anyone actually fed their A7s 200, 250 or even the rated 300wpc and seen the results? Or has nobody survived to tell the tale?:p

mmadden28

Maybe it wasn't the amp, or the speakers, but perhaps your source (AVR, CDP, Pre, etc) that was clipping or distorting? Maybe try another source first?
I've learned that you should never turn it all the way up.
Just throwing it out there.

Oh Welcome to the Club. :cool:

Fongolio

First, welcome to the forum. I have a pair of RTiA7's hooked up to an amp switch. In one position the switch connects the A7's to my Yamaha AVR with a CSi40 center and RTi70 surrounds. It sounds fantastic but yes is a little underwhelming when pushed hard. Put the switch in position 2 and the A7's connect to my two channel setup which is a Pro-ject 6.9 turntable Carver CT-7 pre-amp and Carver TFM-25 amp. Also connected for two channel is my Pioneer Elite 79-Avi disk player. With this setup the A7's seriously rock. The Carver puts out around 225 rms wpc. It goes seriously loud but with very little distortion. I've never cranked it to the full 225 on the meters but don't want to. It's loud enough for me. The other thing that more power gives you is great definition at low volumes which this setup really has. I've heard some people having these speakers with 300 wpc but I don't know about wide open throttle. Have fun with those great Polk speakers.

leroyjr1

No matter how little or much power you have every speaker has it's limits.

audion3wb

I thought about that also, and I know people are going to want to grill me about saying "turned the volume all the way up" but I hope people take that with a grain of salt because I know better than to turn my receiver volume knob up until it wont go any further. The point at which things started gettint a little unplesant was at -10 on my Onkyo receiver and I figured I should at least be able to go to -10 it without hurting anything.

I listen to movies quite frequently at -10 but that is 5.1 so I am splitting my amps power to 3 other speakers and im crossing my fronts over at 60hz and my center/surrounds at 80hz so obviously my fronts arent getting overpowered when used for HT. At -10 level with all my speakers going I can have peaks around 103 dB, but I attest those peaks to my subwoofer (outlaw LFM-1 EX) which has pretty good SPL.

So in short, yea I know I wasnt pushing the input signal from the receiver to the amp too far and causing the amp to clip.

Really its just my curiosity speaking. My system goes louder than I need it to and I am plenty happy. Its kinda like having the sports car that will do 180 Mph, you cant ever realistically do it but knowing that you could is pretty cool. I don't want to send any more power to my speakers because I treasure my ability to hear and I really don't want to damage it .

If anything the possibility of my source material sucking could have been the case. I was feeding it average bitrate MP3s via my xbox 360 at the time. I have noticed that when I play a CD in my PS3 it sounds a lot better than my 360 did, dunno if Im crazy or the PS3 actually does a better job decoding.

Thanks Fongolio for your response. Thats the answer that I was after. So if for some strange reason I did get a bigger amp I would know that my speakers should handle it just fine

mmadden28

With that said-I'm using my Onk 805 as a pre/pro into an XPA-5 into RTi12s. Yeah more power to more power hungry speakers so not really a fair comparison, but I've definately had the dial up to at least 0db or higher without issue (I'm afraid to go all the way just to see ). Of course some things sounded harsher that others--What were you listening to?

audion3wb

Its been a while since I did the 2 channel test. It was a pretty good mix of rock/classical/hiphop. A lot of everything. One thing I did notice that on certain bass heavy tracks they ran into some trouble. My sub does a lot better job of taking care of the LFE.

Sometimes I wish I had gotten the XPA-5. I didn't because i figured 200wpc would be too much for my surrounds rated at 125WPC. In retrospect I wish I bought the XPA-5 but honestly I don't think Im missing out very much at all.

leroyjr1

If you find yourself listening to music that loud quite often you should look into some bigger speakers.