# Program/Continuous/Peak-speakers and amps



## stjc15

This is something that I have never really understood for a long time. On speaker specifications, wattages are called continuous, program and peak. I Understand what peak is. However, I thought that program and continuous were the same, until I saw it on one sheet for one speaker. What do they really mean? Also, do you get an amp for the speaker that is the same as the peak, same as the program, or in-between? Which is best?


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## Radman

Do a search of the forum, there are several good threads that will tell you exactly what you asked.


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## Cooze

Dont hold me to this but as far as I can remember you should be buying an amp that powers about what the continuous power is rated to, as for the program rating I am not completly sure but I would assume that anything below that would be dangerous to the speaker. You may want to double check my answer but I think its right.


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## cutlunch

The difference between continuous and program is:
Continuous is normaly the RMS rating where the power handling is calculated when feeding one continuous tone eg 1004KHz at a given input level.
The RMS value is the one to work with. (RMS = Root Mean Square. It is basicaly is a way of stating the level of an AC signal that would be needed to provide the same heating power of a DC supply into the same load.

Program is where you play a music track as opposed to a continuous single tone. Because the peaks vary in a piece of music this rating is usually set higher then continuous because the peaks only occur occasionally the amplifier can handle it for short time.

Basicaly ignore everything but the continuous which should be given as watts rms. The others really don't mean much. For instance I have small bookshelf speakers rated as 1000 Watts Peak Music Power Output. Yeah right.

The rule of thumbs for amps is that for the speaker rating in watts RMS the amplifier power rms should be within the range 1.8 to 2.2 times greater then the speaker.


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## filtalr

"Basicaly ignore everything but the continuous which should be given as watts rms. The others really don't mean much. For instance I have small bookshelf speakers rated as 1000 Watts Peak Music Power Output. Yeah right."
Exactly -- PMPO  is a worthless measure of an audio device's output - avoid it like the plague... RMS is really the only way to go there.


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## mbenonis

I JUST made a long-winded post on this very subject here.


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## anticowboyism

perfect answer cutlunch. you get a gold star.


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