And if you saturate the OT for an extended period of time, what happens? Cooked OT?
Not unless you're also exceeding the voltage and/or current ratings of the transformer.
Imagine you have an 8 oz glass, and you have it under a running faucet. There's a fair-sized hole near the bottom where water can run out.
Let's say you're filling the glass faster than the water can run out the bottom. Eventually, the glass will fill up and overflow. But the glass will stay intact unless you're filling it with a 150psi firehose.
It's an imperfect analogy, but a transformer makes use of the fact that current in a wire sets up a magnetic field around the wire. If you wind that wire in a coil, you can concentrate the field. Placing another coil nearby allows coupling from coil A to coil B, which is aided even further by adding a magnetic core to the mix.
Now a core can handle but some much of this magnetizing force before it's max'd out. So you can pump more energy into coil A, but beyond a certain limit, the core won't help transmit any more of that energy into coil B. The water running out the bottom hole can come out but so fast...
Maybe a better analogy is a 12AX7 gain stage. You can see by plotting a load line that it only takes maybe 4-5v peak to peak to run the full extent of a given load line. If you apply a 40v peak to peak signal, you won't get any more output at the plate, you just get closer to a square wave as the tube alternately saturates and cuts off. You'd think you might damaage something, but if the supply voltage isn't over 300v (doesn't exceed plate voltage rating), and the plate load resistor is 100k, you won't redplate the tube. No amount of input signal can cause it to draw more than 300v/100k = 3mA, 300v * 3mA = 0.9w. You simply get a more and more distorted output.
Similarly, unless there is some condition in place to allow your output stage to exceed the transformer's voltage and/or current ratings, applying too much power simply saturates the core and distorts the output to the speaker. Core saturation also results in a drop of primary inductance, so the bass doesn't extend as low as before, and is why O'Connor and others simply note you get "more distortion and less bandwidth."
And yes Sluckey you as a moderator have the power of a Hucklebearer.
The
real question is, "where the hell is 'yonder' and why is everything over it?"
