[londons_explore]

Dedicated speakers are overbuilt so this won't happen easily.

It's speakers inside a phone or something that are very size-performance limited and are vulnerable to this. Those same devices tend to have advanced processing of audio headed to the speakers to make it sound better and not blow up the speaker.

An old Motorola I had had over 15,000 knobs to tweak in the audio section of the service app...

[throwaway789657]

So if I turn the knob on my a/v receiver all the way up, my speakers won't blow out? I'm obviously not going to try it, but my understanding is that they would get damaged. To prevent this, I set a maximum volume on the receiver's settings to the loudest I'm practically interested in, given the size of the room and such. But that probably means I'm capping my volume a good bit below the guaranteed safe level, which only the speaker manufacturer is really in a position to know.