The Amp and the Speaker will just work on "one half" of their
normal area. (50% of its audio loudness).
Exactly, that is the difference I hear in loudness.
It shouldn't hurt the amp or the speaker as long as you don't try
to pump up the volume. You might break the speaker if you increase
too much the volume. (it will sound soft but you are pushing it
too much to one of its extremes).
Indeed, this is an important warning that should be in the docs (if it's there other than getting rid of DC offset, I must have missed it)
Personally, I like to play it safe and add a [hip~ 5] as a DC filter before my [dac~] :-)
I do this, too, just by (blindly) following the pd manual and helpfiles... perhaps this calls for a tiny adjustment to the [dac] object to always implement a hipass (with perhaps a flag to revert to a non-hipass-5 enabled [dac]). Just a thought, but one that could be easily argued against given pd's agnostic qualities.
You might use your DAC to send control voltages for a modular synthesizer, for example.
I have never tried this, but I guess it might be an edge case, and quite an interesting one.
So, if I want to get more technical as to what exactly happens to the speakers when sending such "malformed" or "halfformed?" signals, do you know where I can find good sources that would explain this? I guess there's a math foundation here that would justify the need for a -1..1 correct signal range... an age old one that probably relates to the Nyquist theorem... but I can't see how.
In any case, thanks again for the quick replies!
Best,
f