How would an amplifier send heat down the speaker wire? The amp does put out more power when it is clipping due to the area under the sine wave curve increasing. Think of a sine wave. Actually, draw one. Well, here, I'll draw one for you. The black is the maximum unclipped signal that the amplifier can put out. The thinner black lines represent the limit. When you turn the gain up too far, the signal wave does get a higher amplitude, as seen by the red sine wave (poorly and quickly drawn). However, because the amplifier has reached it's signal amplitude limit (thin black lines) it has to cut off the peaks and valleys of the sine wave. It cuts it off along the blue dotted line. So the red line/blue dotted line is what is sent to your speaker. Notice the area under the red/blue curve is greater than the area under the black curve. That extra area is extra power being sent. A fully clipped, square wave has twice the power as a normal sine wave of the same amplitude. Read this thread: http://www.soundsolutionsaudio.com/forum/i...showtopic=19001 Actually the first link in djjdnap's post at the bottom explains all this better.