Speakers Having More Power than Reciever?

Your speakers will become very uncomfortable on your ears before they will blow. Keep the volume below distortion and you will be fine.

You'll be fina as long as you don't blast them.

The RC's are sensitive, handle up to 225 watts and 91dB, easy to drive. That Onkyo should be fine. I have the 50's and prior to my current setup was using an older Yamaha HTR, rated at 90 or 100 wpc, cant remember right now, drove them fine. Very nice speakers.

If you run a sub crossed over at 80hz and set speakers to small you will be fine.

Since the bigger danger of damaging a speaker is more related to over driving the amplifier/receiver into clipping and frying the tweeter - how would setting speakers to small be 'safer' if you over drive the amp into clipping?

Thanks,
Erik

Well, by setting the speakers to small, the amp is no longer responsible for reproducing the bottom octaves as those are handled by the amp in the sub. Further, in ported speaker designs it's common to see a low impedance trough or two in those regions which call for the amp to provide more current. If the amp doesn't have to handle that, then it's better capable of handling everything else. It's not a guarantee, but it does improve your odds that your amp won't be clipping.

I'm gonna get people riding me like I'm Seabiscuit for this but, are you doing 7.1 or 5.1?

If you're doing 5.1 you're going to have 2 unused amplifier channels just idling along. Why not use one of the features your 606 provides you with and bi-amp your front speakers? IMHO this will further reduce the possiblity of feeding your tweeters a clipped signal. Speaker wire is cheap and, as I have claimed for myself, you'll appear more sophisticated.

All the answers are correct, but the premise of the question is wrong. There is no need to match the maximum power output of the receiver to the maximum allowed input of the speaker.

True - but now you're throwing money away on a tower speaker that can dig down to to the 34hz range. Also, we don't even know if Morgan has a sub!

Morgan - those 50's will be fine. As bob mentioned, the 50's are a very sensitive speaker and don't need a lot of power to drive them very loud. The only way you'll clip your amp is you have a very large party with a lot of people you don't know who want to turn up the volume on your receiver to '11'. Or, if you watch movies very loud and there is particularly dynamic sequence that causes the speaker to draw more power than the Onkyo is rated for.

As an FYI - I use a 100 watt/channel H/K amp for my RC-70's (which are rated for max power of 250 watts). My H/K receiver (AVR-520) is possesed. Every once in a while (like about 3 times a year, if that much) without warning, the volume just starts to increase. I've run Polks (RT800i's), Ascends (340's), and these Energy's off the receiver/amp combo for 6 years now (wow - time flys). Anyway, for all these speakers, I've had the receiver go to full volume before I could get there (usually doing some kind of work when it happens). The receiver or amp NEVER damaged the speakers. It plays really really LOUD, but zero damage.

The reason is it's a 'high current' amp and it can supply the wattage required for short bursts without 'clipping'. I'm no 100% sure, but I think your Oink is also a high current receiver. If so, you'll be fine for those one off movie sequences.

I don't see it as money thrown away as you gain enormous flexibility with respect to speaker/sub positioning while still retaining the other benefits of the speaker. I figure he's got a sub seeing as he's not posting in the 2 channel area.