Polk RT800i - one speaker noticeably louder than the other

HTguru1982

I've been trying to troubleshoot this one on my own but I'm stumped. One of my RT800i is louder than the other. The drivers seem to be working. There is no rubbing or scratching when I push in the woofers. The tweeter is producing sound. Up close, the speaker seem to be putting out the same amount of sound as the other one but when in the listening position, one side dominates the other. I have swapped speakers and the change in output stays with the speaker which would indicate that it isn't my AVR.

I have removed the drivers and crossovers and visually inspected them but have found no sign of damage. Could there be anything wrong with any of the components that just isn't visible? I am the second owner of these speakers. Could the previous owner have changed out a driver and possibly wired them back the wrong way. This was actually the case with my RT16's where the previous owner swapped out a blown driver and wired it out of phase(only took me a few minutes to figure that one out). But everything looks fine in these.

:question:

treitz3

Hello, HTguru1982. Have you verified that all of the drivers are working yet? If you take an empty toilet paper roll or an empty paper towel roll and place one end to your ear, the other end towards each driver with a song playing....you should be able to determine if all of the drivers are working in the speaker that has less volume. Try this and get back to us.

Tom

HTguru1982

Thanks for the reply, treitz. I may have found the problem.

The tweeter in the "bad" speaker is slightly discolored, which I thought to be fairly normal for aging Tri Lam tweeters. But under better lighting, I now can see that the discoloration is worse than I thought, especially around the outer rim of the tweeter. I found another thread where someone described the same thing I'm seeing and it turned out to be a "cooked" tweeter. It still seems to work but apparently not as well as the other. After taking apart both speakers this afternoon and verifying that everything is hooked up correctly, I have to say that it's the tweeter that's the problem. Guess I'm on the hunt for an SL6506.

WLDock

The same thing happened to me when I bought my center used. It looked fine and played but once I got it home after a couple of weeks I realized that the dome was discolored and seperating a but. i found this out because the center just was not as bright as the mains. Oh well, I have a temp cl5509 in place but need a replacement driver myself. I might pull one out of my surrounds and swap them.