Here's the longer explanation of how clipping works. Remember that truncated sine wave? What is happening in reality is that you are generating a whole bunch of "harmonics". Ok, crack out your Calculus book. Ever heard of Fourier? Basically, you can recreate any wave shape by adding up a bunch of sine waves at varing frequencies and amplitudes. To make a square wave (which is what a clipped signal starts to look like), you take a base frequency, and continue to add in the odd order harmonics. So if you had a clipped 300Hz, I think you end up with harmonics at 900Hz, 1500Hz, 2100Hz, etc. (I think that's right?). As the frequency rises, the amplitude of each of the harmonics decreases. However, if you had a high energy 300Hz tone, the harmonics may end up having lots of energy in them compared to what a tweeter might normally see at a given frequency. That clear things up any more - didn't think so...

My usual advice at this point would be to build some speakers yourself. I'm a huge proponent of DIY speaker building, for a number of reasons. First, you get awesome speakers for a fraction of the cost of a what you would pay at the retail store. (And yes, they most likely will sound BETTER) In your case, you would have the added benefit of knowing what's going into your speakers - the (true) power handling of each of the drivers, the quality of the crossover, etc. There are lots of proven designs out there. There are even several companies that sell "kits", some with and some without prebuilt cabinets. Your family obviously has some mechanical ability, so the cabinet building may not be out of the question.

Thump, thump (stepping off the soap box)

Jason