I was lucky enough to grow up as a teenager in the 70s. Had plenty of those 35,45-watt rms rated 2 channel Stereo receivers, that's what they were called with the A and B speaker selector, two buttons A/B and I used both pushed in running 4 speakers all the time. Blew a lot of tweeters, All on me I would get to about 11-12 O'clock on the volume dial and say to myself, this sounds nice let's go up to 2 O'clock, tweeters started crackling.
I was having lunch yesterday with a friend, who's the regional sales manager for KEF and he was telling me about someone who wanted the same speakers that were part of the subject of a recent AH thread. In the thread, the OP was telling about his system and we got to the subject of blowing speakers, power output, volume control displays and how few actually understand what they're looking at. At one point, I said "People just need to read the manual" and he started laughing. I then said "I'm here all week- try the Veal" because he worked in retail AV sales for a long time and this is still a big problem.
FYI- rated output IS NOT at fully cranked volume control, it's around 12:00-1:00 on most receivers with a rotary volume control. The only reason it goes farther is because some source material is at a lower level, so it needs to be turned up. We repaired a lot of speakers in the late-'70s-through the 1980s......
Then, there are the AVRs with 0-100 or a readout in -xxxdB. 0-100 tells nobody anything. The taper of the control isn't known, so it's all guesswork. Using the -xxxdB scale doesn't tell a lot of people anything because they don't understand decibels and it's the scale I use for all of my installations when possible because it provides a visual landmark during instructions- I tell people that they shouldn't pass -15dB if I can't set a limit and if I can do that, I ALWAYS set it at that point because it allows the system to have some headroom and since I always lock the configuration, they can't mess with it unless they figure out that it only takes a mouse click to unlock it. OTOH, if they change the limit, blow speakers and change it back to where I set it, I know they did it because there's no way the speakers will blow at my setting. I would prefer that unlocking required a password, but.....
I had a customer around 1980 who bought the same model of speakers that I owned and with his new Pioneer SX-780, he roasted the mids and tweeters. Someone from the service department told him that they were damaged from abuse and I can't think of a single speaker manufacturer that covers damage to more than one driver in a system. His dad came in to give us what-for and he loudly said "My son doesn't use his system that way!". I asked if he's at home all day, to see how it's used and he calmly said "Can you call when it's done?". I intervened in the billing and since we were the second US dealer for that brand, they wouldn't have turned us down for a warranty claim, so the dad was very happy when he found out that there would be no charge.
I ran into the kid about fifteen years ago at a Rush show and he asked if I was the guy from the stereo store. When I told him I didn't recognize him, he said "You told me I blew my speakers in a way that you had never seen" and when I said "Oh, I remember now", he just hung his head.
