Speakers
This is a fantastic explanation of amplitude in home entertainment sound systems, and amusing as well:
"The physics of sound is a fairly fascinating subject, but one too large to cover here. Basically speaking, all sound travels in a sine wave. Sound waves (and sine waves) look like big boobs, especially low frequency sound. Nice, curvy titties. The more volume that you ask for, the bigger the tittie the amp has to produce. However, if you want too big of a tittie, and your amp can't give you anything more than a 36C, it still tries to give you what you need. But instead, it produces a truncated tittie. That looks like a big tittie with the top cut off. Then your speaker is like, "What the fuck kind of tittie is this?" And then it tries to deal with it, but speakers really freak out when you give them squared-off titties, and they start making strange noises, and damage themselves in the process. This is called clipping."
"The physics of sound is a fairly fascinating subject, but one too large to cover here. Basically speaking, all sound travels in a sine wave. Sound waves (and sine waves) look like big boobs, especially low frequency sound. Nice, curvy titties. The more volume that you ask for, the bigger the tittie the amp has to produce. However, if you want too big of a tittie, and your amp can't give you anything more than a 36C, it still tries to give you what you need. But instead, it produces a truncated tittie. That looks like a big tittie with the top cut off. Then your speaker is like, "What the fuck kind of tittie is this?" And then it tries to deal with it, but speakers really freak out when you give them squared-off titties, and they start making strange noises, and damage themselves in the process. This is called clipping."