Oh yeah, I can attest to that, especially for car audio. I remember a customer who brought in his car and to demonstrate the "problem" he turned the volume up to full blast. It was total distortion. Seemed crazy that I had to explain that you can't run a system that way. We put some really good Altec Lansing speakers in that car too but you can fry any voice coil if you try hard enough.
Were you involved with IASCA or other competitions? I did a Pontiac GTA with a collection of equipment chosen by one of the sales guys who really didn't understand much of the technology or needs of speakers, fitting in the car, etc. He picked 12" Infinity Kappa woofers in an iso-bandpass cabinet, set into the bin behind the package tray and I got to figure out how to build it with the internal volumes needed. Then, he chose Alpine 6" x 9" midbass drivers for the position next to the rear seats and Infinity 4" x 6" for the dash. He had picked some kind of 6-1/2" for the front doors, but those weren't flat and the crustomer didn't want holes cut. It also had an Alpine parametric crossover and probably an Audio Control crossover, but I don't remember the model- may have been Alpine.
The day I finished, I was under the gun because our store was hosting an IASCA competition and I finished at 5PM. When I asked where the RTA was, I was told that it was outside, at the table where the judging was happening, so the shop manager & I tweaked it by ear. It was a very odd system WRT speakers and placement, but OMG! The image, response, balance of sound and overall sound quality were amazing (and I'm not just patting myself on the back- happy accidents do happen).
Long story short, the car scored very well and in the RTA test, it scored 37 out of 40 points. The guy's previous system was SoundStream amps, don't remember the rest of the system but the subs were a pair of Orion, screwed to a piece of particle board and set in the bin at the rear. He hated the sound so much that he bought an MTX Bass CD, went to a remote corner of the parking lot and absolutely destroyed the subs. I guess I could have prevented it, but never expected someone to hate such a great-sounding system so much they would do that. The real pisser- when he complained to the corporate install manager, the manager sided with that a-hole, not our shop.
