scott wrote:what about a speaker that is rated for 1000W sustained and 2000W peak? can that handle the full wrath of a GK800?
Not really.
Voice coil burnout happens when the coil (wire) has to carry too much current through it for too long. Either low freqs or high freqs can fuck that up.
The deal with clipping in SS amps is that they can (and will) reproduce very high frequencies when clipping.
Tube amps typically only produce that kind of shit if there's an super-HF (probably inaudible) oscillation going on. The nice thing about that kind of oscillation is that it's constant and will show up as a physical vibration in the speaker when the amp is silent. If you notice it in time, you can avoid toasting the driver. And it only happens when the amp is fucked up somehow.
In SS amps, the super-HF is a normal byproduct of the way some of them break up. Wattage rating means you have a burlier voice coil, but not that it will withstand that kind of stuff.
Also, solid state devices are low voltage and high current (tube devices are the opposite). A SS amp is capable of sourcing a great deal of current almost immediately. That current can zap a voice coil like *that* if it's high enough. Think of turning that GK800RB all the way up and going all Brothers Johnson on the bass--spankity spank spank. Hit it right, and you'll dump enough current at once into most any speaker to kill it. Tube amps can't do that, by nature of their design.
Speaker excursion is another primary foe of bass speakers. Again, higher-rated speakers will be burlier but they are still susceptible to getting blown in this way.
Speaker excursion is due to LF and is equivalently probable in either SS or tube amps, in normal use, though the ability of SS amps to source lots of current quickly may make the likelihood of a sudden, destructive excursion more likely.
Also, in my experience, it is hard to get a decent overdriven sound out of a SS amp. If you are used to having (or want to have) a bit of grit to your sound, you may find yourself hitting the speaker harder if you have a SS amp, probably to effect some speaker distortion and give you some of what you would get from the power amp stage of most tube amps. Hitting the speaker harder will wear the thing out faster, obviously.
I used to have a very clean, very powerful little SS bass amp, made by this guy Walter Woods. Great amp in some applications. I toasted four (4!) 400W EV drivers trying to make it sound like my SVT, which never once toasted a speaker.
eliya, you can still kill the EV with the GK even if it's not clipping. But it's much less likely, and you will probably hear the speaker ganking out to warn you it's being stressed.