The RMS VS Peak Power Analogy Help You Understand What Your Amp or Speaker Can Take

0:00 Specifications of a speaker or

Right, my name is Jonathan Ellaskins, The DJ Tutor. I give online lessons for DJs, do private lessons as well on Facebook. PM if you're interested. Stuff's in the description. And also, on the odd occasion, I do some wacky video that hopefully will make sense. Now, are you confused with RMS, peak power and goodness knows what? You look at the specifications of a speaker or an amplifier and you're just baffled. Because you just want to know what it does? Well, a lot of speaker manufacturers and amplifier manufacturers will baffle you with science and make you believe that you're getting something that's going to push out a million gigawatts when really it's probably a load of crap. Now this video hopefully should show you what to look for. It's a bit of an analogy and I'm the first one to ever do it because I'm crazy. Right!

Let's have a look at this piece of paper here on a cardboard box. Right, I'm now going to turn the screen on the camera so I can see exactly what I'm doing. Now, I've got three elastic bands and I have got some numbers. 250, 500, 1000, 1500 and 2000. People are already getting this. But I believe this is a frigging good analogy. Alright, so we have... An amplifier or we could have a speaker from a manufacturer who says that that will do 1000 watts or 750 watts. It'll push out 750 watts of power. This one here could do maybe 1000 or 1500 and this one here could do 2000. So these are amplifiers, they could also be speakers as well. So, let's have a twang with this one here. Now I'm going to grab hold of this speaker. Now let's imagine we're starting to put audio through this speaker or we're starting to put power through the amplifier.

2:18 It's happily chugging away, pushing out some power

It's still working. It's happily chugging away, pushing out some power. So just make note of that position. But when I bring it up to 500 and maybe up to here... Oh gosh, there you go. OK, so around about 1,000, it just stopped. It broke. Now that is because it reached its peak power. Now did you notice when we got to about here, it snapped. That's because this amplifier down here was happily chugging away at 250. But as soon as you started going up the scale, you were putting a lot of pressure on that amp and once we got to about 1000, it just stopped working. But did you notice that it was able to get to a thousand for a short amount of time? Now, if I'd have just tapped it into a thousand briefly for like a millisecond, it probably could have coped at a thousand. But down here at 250 and in between sort of 500, it was happily just chugging away and it could have probably done that all day.

The true, maybe RMS of it, was around about 250 to 500 around here. But its peak power was 1,000. Now a lot of manufacturers will say it's 1,000 watts. What they won't tell you is that that is actually all it can do for a very, very short limited amount of time. Now let's have a look at this other amplifier and by the sounds of it now I don't think this box is going to be big enough but we'll see. Tall enough. Right, so let's check this one out now. So we're going over the 250, we're quite happy, we're over the 500, we're quite happy and we're now on the 1000 and I'm now starting to feel a little bit of movement and pull against my finger here. So this could be in between the 500 and the 1000.

4:31 This amplifier it was happy around

It's RMS. It's happily moving away here and I could probably do this all day. We get to 1,500 and now I can feel a bit of pressure on there. We get up to 2,000 and there we go. You see? Just over 2,000 it broke. So again if we look at this amplifier it was happy around this sort of area about 1,000 but then as soon as we got to above 2,000 it broke. So that was its peak power. Now let's have a look at the last one here. This one is now, it's not doing anything here at 500. It's happy. It could do that all day. It could do 1000 all day. It could do 1500. Ah, but now coming up to 2000, it's now starting to feel tension. So I would say that if I carried on moving and using this amp or this speaker at 2000 watts, I'd start to put a bit of pressure on it.

But if I bring it down here to about 1500, I could do that all day. It's quite happy. But then further you get up there, out until eventually it stops working. So that last speaker or amplifier, its probable peak power was more like 3000 watts, but its peak power would only have lasted for a fraction of a second before It went bang! So this is it. This is a very simple analogy and it's something that you need to get into your head. It's very simple. When you see anything on a speaker or an amplifier with two, three, four thousand watts, try and do some homework. Google it and find its RMS because that is what it should be able to do. Over a long period of time, without having any detrimental effect to any of the components. I hope that's been a help. Practice and enjoy. Carry on twanging.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.