planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

I'm considering adding my first amplifier as an upgrade to my current system (Denon X4700H, mixture of Klipsch and Polk speakers in a 7.2.2 configuration). My initial thought, after watching a bunch of You-Tube videos and reading articles is something like the Emotiva XPA-5 (5 channels @250WPC). If it's like bi-amping my speakers (did for a while) I would probably notice a cleaner sound, but I don't know about instrument/sound effect clarity. The Denon person said I'd have more headroom and be able to play them louder and that too little power to speakers can do more damage than too much. My speakers should be able to handle them with between 75/300 (heights) to 150/600 (center). The amp would double the output of the AVR, which would still power my satellite surround modules.

kpmac Loc: Ragley, La

Way too technical for me. I just want simple surround sound. Mine works fine the way I set it up.

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

So does mine...I just want to tweak it incrementally, replacing one thing, adding another. I've replaced my center channel twice so far.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

I'd love to hear an explanation as to why under powering speakers damages them.
I really, really would.
That blew my trust in that person right there.

I don't know what "heights" and "center" are, but a speakers are rated for a maximum wattage (power), not physical size.

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

The center channel speaker goes between the right and left speakers and plays mainly the vocals and similarly located sounds in a TV show, movie or when playing music. The heights are also what they sound like - speakers that play sounds that are supposed to be coming form above your head, like a jet plane or a bird singing in a tree. It's sometimes called by it's trade name, Atmos but may or may not technically be. There are a variety of 3D audio formats for home theater setups, just like as in a movie house, I just found this report from a Google search (it's a portion of the article, actually). It's apparently from a review on car audio systems, but it should be applicable.

"What About The Myth of Not Having Enough Power?
The myth about not having enough power and damaging speakers is based around what happens when you drive an amplifier into clipping. Let’s say you have a radio with a 20-watt amplifier rated at 1% distortion. You “can” get a lot more power out of that amp, but it will include a LOT of harmonic information. If you were playing a 1 kHz tone at a total output level of 30 watts, you would hear significant 2 kHz, 4 kHz, 8 kHz and 16 kHz energy being produced. This addition of high-frequency energy can strain the thermal capabilities of the tweeters in your system.

Underpowered Speakers
A graphical representation of how an amplifier behaves when driven into distortion. You can see significant harmonic content alongside the 1 kHz fundamental frequency.
If you don’t have a powerful enough amplifier to reach the volume levels you want, you can damage the speakers by feeding them too much high-frequency energy by driving the amplifier into clipping. It’s the extra power in these harmonics that damages speakers." Sorry, the graphic didn't copy and paste. You can read the whole article here - https://www.bestcaraudio.com/is-it-possible-to-underpower-a-speaker/,

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Thanks, I was thinking of "normal" listening, no driving to distortion......
Who would want to do that anyway? Sounds lousy.

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

When I bi-amped my front two speakers I believed it sounded better...cleaner and crisper and felt that I could go without a subwoofer when playing certain music, like jazz. That's why I agree to a certain extent more power is better. When I added my height channels I could no longer use the extra leads on the AVR. To possibly overcompensate (especially watching movies) I added a 2nd sub. If I'm watching Jurassic Park, I can feel my pant legs vibrate when the T-rex is roaring or when a bomb is going off in Saving Private Ryan.

aphelps Loc: Central Ohio

How does too little power damage the speakers? Sounds like a sales pitch. How did you connect bi-amp?

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Yea.
I had a nice setup (for us) that when the kids turned the volume up one time during the movie Twister, the 12" woofers made the windows rattle. "You get the front door, I'll get the back!".

BebuLamar

Most of the power of an amp would go to the woofer and not the tweeter because in general there is much more energy in the lower frequency and the crossover will route it that way.
An underpowered amp could go into distortion and the distorted waveform with all the harmonics could have significantly higher energy in the high frequency range which goes to the tweeter and damage it. But any way as long as the it sound OK there should be no problem.

Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States

Like I said, I never considered running to distortion.
Who would do that?
("Normal" operation it won't damage them.)

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

I posted the link to an article I found about the underpower issue 3 or 4 messages above. The speakers I have for my mains - Klipsch RP600Mii - (and several others on the market of different brands) have two sets of binding posts for speaker wires instead of one. One set of wires powers the woofer and one powers the tweeter (something to do with feedback, but I don't really understand it). Doing so gives the sound a little more oomph, but you need to have an unused set of terminals on the back of your receiver to do it. My AVR has 9 amps but 11 processors. Before I had the center speaker I had a spare set of posts - my rear height, which I still don't have. That's where I would have...holy cow! I just realized I CAN still bi-amp the front L/R using the rear height terminals. I looked through the connection schematic for the receiver as I was writing this and trying to copy the image to show you :) According to the diagram, "When you connect speakers for 8 or more channels, the output speakers automatically
switch according to the input signal and sound mode."

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

I just found this article, which partially explains bi-amping. I was looking for something more theoretical as far as electrical engineering goes, but I'll still look. I can also see if my brother (EE professor) or dad (retired Northrop Defense project engineer) can explain the ambient feedback mentioned in a couple of the search answer options. https://www.crutchfield.com/S-T01pwRm9oCm/learn/why-biamp-your-speakers.html This is more of what I was looking for (from Wikipedia)
"Benefits
Most audible differences are subtle. If at all noticeable, many benefits of bi-amping cannot be realized if passive crossover networks of a speaker system are not removed.[1] Benefits include transients are less likely to cause amplifier overload (clipping) and/or speaker damage, and reduced intermodulation distortion, elimination of errors introduced by low frequency passive crossover, reduction of load presented to the power amplifier, better matching of power amplifier and speaker driver and others.[2] In large professional sound systems, Bi-amping is pretty much the norm with the greater benefits easily outweighing the costs. All speakers are two-way transducers and can introduce current back into the driving circuit from ambient sound. The driving amplifier tries to control the effect of this with its damping factor (having a high resistance to such current), but with a passive crossover, this current can still leak across to the other driver units in the circuit. A Bi-amped system is therefore able to better resist ambient sound feeding back into the circuit. With high volumes and larger venues, such ambient feedback can have a significant damaging effect to the overall sound." Personally, I noticed a difference and will re-bi-amp my speakers this afternoon.

planepics Loc: St. Louis burbs, but originally Chicago burbs

Update - I set up my Denon to bi-amp the front speakers in 7.1 mode w/surround back, connected the right speaker with the extra wire, turned off the subwoofer (2-channel mode) and used my phone-app decibel meter to check and see if there was a difference. From the same position, within maybe a few mm, the bi-amped speaker was about 2 Db louder when playing a test tone and the edges of the phone barely touching the woofers.

Bayou

Emotiva makes high quality gear at reasonable prices.

Under powered amplification can damage tweeters if driven into clipping for extended periods. Clipping causes an amp to deliver a great abundance of high frequency noise that can overheat tweeter voice coils and cause permanent damage.