Re: matching amp with speakers
Here's the best advise so far. If it starts sounding like crap you should seriously think about what is going on.
Trying to figure where to set limiters based on manufacturer's specs is somewhat a guessing game because the specs are considering a conditioned signal which may or may not resemble your program material. So you have to make an educated guess as to how far apart you really are.
Depending on your skill level, I think for best possible performance you should use amps that can deliver the full rated peak power of your speaker. That way the built-in limiters will be clamping down should you push the amp into actually delivering those peaks. But at the time you fire off those limiters I would expect that you would be delivering somewhere around 1/8th of the continuous rated power of that amp into top boxes and maybe 30-50% with heavily compressed bass material into subs. So I don't see you ever hitting Bennet's -3dB RMS limiting point. It should start sounding poorly before that.
All that said, in my experience over excursion is probably 10-50 times more likely to cause you problems than over-powering in the thermal sense.
