Bass distortion before tweeter distortion with a monitor at high volume?

I don't agree with you, elevick. 

Distortion goes up significantly beyond 90db for almost all speakers. One of the online magazines does a signal-noise sweep using both 90db and 95db volumes. So with small speakers you're approaching the cliff with only 2 watts of power (assuming 87W sensitivity). 32W and your speaker distortion will be pretty bad.

+1 sbjoe

Bass is very power hungry and may cause an amp to clip. A clipping amp will very quickly burn out the tweeter even at levels the tweeter could normally handle.

Active speakers with separate amps for each driver will handle high SPL better.

Many tweeters are power limited also. Soundstage publishes tests at 95 SPL and most speakers show compression distortion (non linearities) at even those modest levels.

If you want something small that plays loud try ATC or Dynaudio

Active Speaker is highly recommended.

I would look into Quested Speakers first before ATC or PMC. The Quested Sound and its pricing is more competitive then ATC Or PMC.

The V2108 Quested Speaker are the ones Hans Zimmer uses.

Thanks for all the interesting answers and differing points of view.  I don't have the knowledge of many of the experienced posters here and it is nice to be able to take advantage of it.   It seems it might be a good idea to look for a speaker/tweeter that has a lower THD?  Are there any graphs or measurements available to show this and it be worthwhile?

Here is the site I was referring to. In their distortion tests, they show the distortion as DB, not percentage. There are calculators if you want the actual numbers. In short, the number of db between the signal (top line) and distortion (bottom line) is what you are looking at.

http://www.soundstagenetwork.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=941:nrc-measur...


The takeaway from the KEF LS50 graph is that little mid-woofers are really pretty terrible at bass. I think it also dispels the myth that most subs aren't "fast enough" to integrate. Most subs have many many times lower distortion at bass frequencies. 

If you go to the Measurements menu and select speakers, there are quite a few speakers to choose from. For larger speakers, they do a test at both 90db and 95db. 

It doesn't look like most tweeters have significant measurable distortion at 95db.

I can also tell you that if I plug the ports of my Revel M106s, the midrange clears up a good bit, so even limiting the woofer's excursion physically helps. Unfortunately, that makes integrating with a sub difficult because the sub has to play at a little higher frequency and I get localization of the sub's sound.