Clipping is a form of waveform distortion that occurs when an amplifier is overdriven, which happens through attempts to increase the voltage or current beyond its threshold of power.
In power amplifiers, the signal from an amplifier operating in clipping has two characteristics that could damage a connected loudspeaker:
* Because the clipped waveform has more area underneath it than the smaller unclipped waveform, the amplifier produces more power. This extra power can cause damage to any part of the loudspeaker, including the woofer, tweeter, or crossover, via overheating or overexcursion. * In the frequency domain, clipping produces strong harmonics in the high-frequency range. Extra high-frequency weighting of a signal is more likely to damage a tweeter than a signal that was not clipped. However most loudspeakers are designed to handle signals with abundant high frequencies, like cymbal crashes, which have a greater high-pitch frequency weighting than amplifier clipping could produce. Therefore damage attributable to this characteristic is rare.
Other effects of clipping include:
* When applied to a musical signal, the clipping may prevent a note from decaying in a normal amount of time. This can cause rapidly played notes to blend together. * Music which is clipped experiences amplitude compression, whereby all notes begin to sound equally loud as loud notes are be clipped to the same output level as softer notes.