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Blown Speaker??

Lol, leave it to the guy who posted another thread about being able to smell his speakers :-)

Okay, so yesterday at the end of my listening session I started to hear a little crunchiness in my right uni q mid / tweet driver. Thought to myself "huh, wonder if that was the recording or my speaker". Anyways I shut er off and didn't turnitback on till this morning. Immediately, and at low volumes I heard nasty nasty crunchiness/ distortion and thought "yep, blown speaker". Pushed in on the driver to see if I could feel crunch going on but nothin, smooth and glass. Pulled driver out of speaker (quite unfun by the way on a pair of qx5's) and pushed / pulled driver in and out to see if there was any crunch there; nope, nothin. Put driver back in speaker and now I don't have the crunchy distorted sound any more.

I don't think I "fixed" anything by pushing / pulling on the speaker, I think the crunchiness worked itself out, possibly as the voice coil warmed / woke up? I would be more suprised if I didn't hear the crunchy sound again than if I did, especially after a resting period for the speaker.

Have any of you experienced this same scenario? I've already sent kef an e-mail asking about pricing and availability on this driver, so we'll see how much a uni q costs.

By the way, I sniffed the innards while I had my speaker dissected and still couldn't detect where that dang smell was coming from. I'm still thinking it was hot voicecoils / glue warming up? or hot crossovers. Who knows, but I haven't really smelled that smell since the first time a couple of weeks ago when I started that other thread about smelling your speakers when rocking out.

By the way, I partly blame those dang pangea powercords as the addition of them brought out so much more, and deeper, bass. Not complaing, it's just now, with other changes that I've been doing to my set-up, my system really has the grunt to start damaging speakers and not in the "too little power, too much distortion sense", more the "lots of power, lots of dynamics" sense.
128x128b_limo
b_limo's avatar
b_limo OP
2,274 posts
 
Lol, uh, no. Don't want cerwin vegas. And when I say loud, it's not really that loud probably. I might play one or two songs with peak db's around the 95 db range, i'm not talking 110 db or anything, but even when in the 80-95db average range, the bass can border what I think is close to damaging my little 6.5" drivers. That's actually the reason why I traded studio 60's awhile back to a "lesser" studio 20; 5" vs. 6.5".

Anyhoo, what I can't figure out is why the crunchy sound went away today after about 2 minutes. When I first heard it today I switched my speaker cable on my smp right away to make sure it was in fact the speaker and not something else, and it was the speaker. I played a song at low volumes, leaned into the volume on the second song, didn't really hear the cruchy sound, then I disconnected and disassembled my speaker (just to see if when moving the speeaker in and out if I could feel a damaged voicecoil, which I didn't) then I reassembled the speaker and never heard the noise again, even at moderately loud volumes listenjng to music with a driving bass line.
I'm interested to see if said crunchiness returns at the intial warm up my next listening session.
csontos
1,311 posts
 
It's very unlikely the voice coil warped from 'too much power' at 95db peaks. Too much power would more likely cause other kinds of damage such as broken/torn suspension parts. Overheating happens from over driving the amp. So it would be the 'not enough power' scenario at 95db that would have caused the coil to warp. It's possible a piece of debris is trapped in the motor and found it's way into the coil gap since the problem disappeared.
jjrenman
279 posts
 
It's possible that you got the insulation on the voice coil wires to melt a bit.
schipo
1,268 posts
 
yep it has to be those darn pangea powercords.
b_limo's avatar
b_limo OP
2,274 posts
 
Schipo, it's not yhe Pangea cords, I'm thinking that it might be do to the amount of bass that I'm getting now from the addition of the pangea power cords. I know that sounds stupid, but seriously, my set-up has quite a bit more bass as a result of the power cords, in addition to a lightspeed attenuator that I recently got. And like I said, I'm not complaining one bit, because in comparison to cheap factory supplied power cords and my old classe ssp-25 preamp, my setup went from sounding flat and lifeless to pretty dynamic with quite a bit of punch in the bass regions. If you've ever done upgrades to your system that yield those results you might understand what I'm thinking.
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