I listen to a wide variety of music in the car, and like my music fairly loud, but notice that when playing some bass heavy music such as drum and bass, dubstep and hip hop which feature very low frequency notes that only subwoofers can handle, it causes slight distortion and the doors start of rattle, especially at high volumes. The amp is making the speakers play frequencies that are beyond the speaker's frequency range (can't really blame the speakers as there is no dedicated sub).The equalizer settings are optimized for general listening, with the bass set to middle setting.

Am I causing long term damage to my speakers by letting them distort slightly? I don't really want to have to change the EQ every time I want to listen to some DnB. I think the speakers on the Sony DAB are fairly high quality Sony ones with metal cones instead of paper, so I'm hoping they can withstand a bit of abuse?

Solution = stick radio 2 on ;)

huh i have a sony system and ... well distortion occurs at high level aswell... =( you have to crank it up though lol. I cannot compare really as i had never had the other system

I listen to a wide variety of music in the car, and like my music fairly loud, but notice that when playing some bass heavy music such as drum and bass, dubstep and hip hop which feature very low frequency notes that only subwoofers can handle, it causes slight distortion and the doors start of rattle, especially at high volumes. The amp is making the speakers play frequencies that are beyond the speaker's frequency range (can't really blame the speakers as there is no dedicated sub).The equalizer settings are optimized for general listening, with the bass set to middle setting.

Am I causing long term damage to my speakers by letting them distort slightly? I don't really want to have to change the EQ every time I want to listen to some DnB. I think the speakers on the Sony DAB are fairly high quality Sony ones with metal cones instead of paper, so I'm hoping they can withstand a bit of abuse?

Hi- if the speakers are metal its probably the tweeters - the woofers are probably paper cones or doped paper cones, the voice coils will probably be round copper, with paper or aluminium formers and ordinary ferrite magnets - in other words fragie/ basic/ cheaply made and i wouldent "push" them- to go up to kapton formers, gapless sxetagonal voice cols and neo (don't ask me to spell it) magnets would cost ££££££s

To upgrade the speakers and properly sound- deaden the doors would be a lot of work/ expense, (and add weight) you could fit an active or passive crossover (i have bipolar electolytic capacitors for a similar purpose) with a sharp cutoff to the main door speakers so they did not have to handle the low frequencies and add a subwoofer ie - the sub handles 20hz to 250hz, (or even a bit higher) and the door speakers the frequencies above that, this would effectively increase the power handling of the existing speakers, and because the door speakers do not have to handle the bass, help to prevent overloading/ resonances/ rattling

Alternatively you could just turn it down a little untill the distortion stops