Speaker "Power Handling" ratings. What they really mean!
A speaker usually has two power handling ratings. "RMS" or continuous, and Peak or Max ratings, measured in watts.
It is also worth while to note that when looking for an amplifier to power your speakers, the "RMS" or continuous power output of an amplifier is measured by the manufacturer using a resistive dummy load on a test bench, with a pink noise test tone at full output. The reality is that in a car, driving speakers in a box or a door panel, listening to music, an amplifier will truthfully never put out it's "rated" power. The real output will be a fraction of that figure, and therefore when choosing an amplifier to power your speakers, you can, most times, safely choose an amplifier with up to 40-50% more rated output power (RMS/continuous rating) than your speakers' continuous power handling figure without concern of damage to the drivers.
Defining RMS and Peak power handling:
When pairing an amplifier and speaker or speakers, you should try to match the amplifier's power output to about 80% of the RMS rating of the speakers, at the load they'll present to the amplifier. This is a good, safe region to aim for if you're unsure of how much power the speakers actually need, and is a very generalized rule of thumb.
Peak ratings are strictly meant to tell you how much heat the voice coils of the speaker can take for a brief, momentary burst of power without essentialy blowing apart the speaker or melting the coils on the spot. This measurement isn't very useful in real world application so it's best left ignored for the most part.
In conclusion, please keep in mind that just because a speaker may say it's rated for 2000 watts RMS, that by no means implies that you actually need that much power to get full output from the speaker. In fact you may need as little as 300 watts RMS to achieve peak excursion in teh right enclosure. This is a common misunderstanding by a large contingent of the car audio world, and one well worth addressing. This is why many people will tell you that you don't always need thousands of watts of power to have a loud system. Increasing power is the least efficient means of increasing volume or output, after all.
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