///M5

Nice.

Ah, the blinking light tool is the biggest waste in car audio. The person selling it the most shady bitch ever. Only cares about his wallet. An Oscope is one million times more useful, but it is still irrelevant for "clipping". If this clipping is related to something in particular or a particular goal then that could be different. Nothing that SMD manufacturers is worth buying. Nothing.

Yep, never at 4v. Shouldn't be. No advantage to a 4v unit either unless of course you have noisy amps.

And most aren't quick enough to pick up transients anyways. I like gauges for everything, but as typical they are mostly to see if the status quo has changed.

It will sound worse than just running the 2 way you have. The whole benefit of having a 3 way is getting to use a single driver optimized for the great majority of the musical range without giving up midbass or top end sparkle. You will gain non of that. The two most important steps in deciding on a logical 3 way setup are 1) driver choice and 2) setting up the crossover appropriately. The 2nd one either requires some serious savvy in making passive crossovers after measuring your speakers in place or a flexible processor with the capability of providing the crossover portion electronically.

ROFL. Go reread the thread. You change your comments to try to not sound stupid left and right...and again you choose to just thread dump. Since you are so emotionally disturbed by what I typed, focus on your discussion with Lithium. Obviously some audio 101 would be helpful as you are stuck repeating every nonsensical fact that car audio shops have been propagating incorrectly for the past 30 years. As for your guess on my life, you are way off...I won't stoop to your level and return the favor

Even if you are burping tones... Seeing a sine wave isn't helpful, measuring distortion or clipping is. Cheap oscilloscopes aren't capable of doing that. There are plenty that are cheaper than the $30k Lecroix that probably can, but el cheapo's won't. I have an unfair advantage of having a whole company full of exotic test & measurement equipment at my disposal...but I've never once used an o'scope for setting a gain and I never will. This is exactly why I asked what you are going to use it for. Something more specific than "clipping" might net you a different answer. I want to help, but you need to help me help you. And yes, Billy Jack is just constantly butt hurt by whatever I say since he regularly posts nonsensical responses and is always derailing threads without idiotic banter. Sad really. Poor guy is so emotionally unstable he spends 20 minutes every day going back searching for old forum posts just to mark mine with a negative rep.

just shut off everything else, no reason to sit in the back. Then vary the level and distortion amount. Teach yourself to hear

Doesn't work. Music won't be recorded at the same level as the test tone. Perhaps one random song or a few, but a bunch will be lower and some higher. Then your setting is wrong. Exactly the reason using an Oscope or other measurement device is completely pointless. Won't tell you anything about what the driver will receive with music. You NEED to train your ear and listen EVERY day. Once you do, you can surely turn the gain up high enough to compensate for any situation and never have a risk to your equipment. Any time high power is involved you can destroy anything. The only real cure is to listen all the time.

You need to train your ear. Regrettably in general human ears are not sensitive to low frequencies. Of course the good news means that you have a hard time hearing distortion at low frequencies. Of course along with this it means most people crank their gains way into distortion on subs and have no idea. As for how to train your ear you can either impart distortion into a song via software or do so by overgaining some section of the amplification chain. No matter where you impart the distortion you can't remove it so that is irrelevant, but getting used to hearing it will help you listen for it and adjust appropriately.

Instead of thread dumping, why not explain how it will help.....or can't you?

Stop intermixing emotion, desire and fact together. You are only confusing yourself. Let's start VERY simple and look at your premise: Answer one simple question and the rest will be clear. Why does it matter if the signal is clipped or not? ie, what about the clipped signal will cause it to "burn up"? Since you hate to answer questions I'll help. It absolutely won't unless the clipping causes you to go over the max power of the driver. Is that clear enough?

I've got a Lecroix Wavepro I really like, but is overkill for even most of the things I use it for.

Then don't bother wasting money on the scope.

The gain level on an amp on its own has ZERO bearing on clipping. It is related to the input voltage as well.

Not even close, you said this which is COMPLETELY different and untrue:

You mean assembled in the USA don't you?

Pulled the Model A and Model T back to town and cleaned them up. Now to sell them.

D'Amore's aren't made here either. Nor are they worth buying.

There is basically no need for an oscilloscope in conventional car audio setups. Very curious what you plan to use it for as that will determine if it is a good choice.

You should be worried about how it sounds and understanding how to set it up. Your amp has a gain knob for a reason. The manufacturer expects input voltages to be able to vary from it's lowest setting to it's highest. Whichever one is right for your car is fine to use. This could be at the minimum or the maximum. Normally it is somewhere in the middle and that can be preferable depending on the equipment, but you can also sure be just fine at either extremes. All this being said, it sounds to us like the way your gains are set right now have no basis in performance or correctness. You should surely start listening more closely and make sure they aren't set in a way that adds distortion and/or noise. If that is the case then you are fine.

Stop guessing. You have no faith in NVX but I have one and it is fine at 100% gain. Absolutely no big deal to it and it won't go poof. Amusingly it is actually designed to do that. Bit of thermal noise at 100%, but no ill effect otherwise. If you have no thermal noise at a gain level there is no reason to run the amp at a lower level. There can surely be reasons why it makes more sense to run it at a lower level, but as long as the input level is matched to the actual input so that the amplifier stays within its specification and doesn't add noise you are golden. Your perfect scenario isn't relevant either, but if you slightly modify what you said it would be fine. A perfect scenario is having enough power to make your subs do what you need without distorting and/or creating thermal noise.

Wow. Rofl. Only two things kill subs. Average power or Instantaneous power. It is completely irrelevant whether the signal is "clipped' or not. Absolutely no bearing whatsoever except of course that by the nature of clipping the power is increased. Plenty of modern music sounds like clipping anyway...boo

FUck yeah! Lighting!

Ok, good: Definition 1: the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively It includes the word intellectual and achievement. Then we can agree.