Blown Driver? ...or just DEAD?
MikeH5997
Posts: 1
In my experience, a "blown" speaker would still emit sound (albeit a very horrible sound) but could a blown speaker emit NO sound AT ALL?
I made the mistake of playing music at too high a volume, for too long a time on an old (circa 1999) Polk RM7300 satellite system, which uses the RM2000II sat's.
Basically, everything was going great for the first couple of hours, but suddenly, I only heard subwoofer and hi's. My drivers (RD5001-2) just went dead. When I opened the sat's the next day, I noticed I fried (literally, it was burnt) one of the two power resistors in each of the crossovers. OK, problem solved, so I thought. (The tweeters were fine, by the way)
When I bench-tested the RD5001-2 drivers, I couldn't get ANY sound whatsoever from these. I'm assuming their dead, but could there be an inline fuse or something? (I couldn't locate one visibly) If not, what actually caused them to die and not "blow" in the usual sense. Not really looking to salvage the drivers (great! if I can) but I'd like to what actually happened. What broke?
-Mike
I made the mistake of playing music at too high a volume, for too long a time on an old (circa 1999) Polk RM7300 satellite system, which uses the RM2000II sat's.
Basically, everything was going great for the first couple of hours, but suddenly, I only heard subwoofer and hi's. My drivers (RD5001-2) just went dead. When I opened the sat's the next day, I noticed I fried (literally, it was burnt) one of the two power resistors in each of the crossovers. OK, problem solved, so I thought. (The tweeters were fine, by the way)
When I bench-tested the RD5001-2 drivers, I couldn't get ANY sound whatsoever from these. I'm assuming their dead, but could there be an inline fuse or something? (I couldn't locate one visibly) If not, what actually caused them to die and not "blow" in the usual sense. Not really looking to salvage the drivers (great! if I can) but I'd like to what actually happened. What broke?
-Mike
Post edited by MikeH5997 on
Comments
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Gently push on the cone of the drivers- it should smoothly move back and forth. Usually when they're blown, they'll "crunch" back and forth, but if you fried stuff, it's possible that you melted the coils in the speaker to the pole... In which case it won't move at all.
I did this to a set of R10's once- I got an amp that I thought was broken, and well, yep, it was.Gallo Ref 3.1 : Bryston 4b SST : Musical fidelity CD Pre : VPI HW-19
Gallo Ref AV, Frankengallo Ref 3, LC60i : Bryston 9b SST : Meridian 565
Jordan JX92s : MF X-T100 : Xray v8
Backburner:Krell KAV-300i -
I once was able to get a collection of headphone drivers, fax machine drivers, all sorts of drivers for trash and blew them all to see what would happen. Generally, when something blows, it just puffs a smoke cloud and stops working, the leads were probably disconnected from the voice coil. Other possibilies would be the crossover, see how that looks if you can get a chance.
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If you ran the volume way to high for "hours" on a sat system and the woofers stopped working, you overheated and most likely burned the voice coils.. they likely wouldnt make a sound after that abuse, minor damage can still let the driver work but just 'scratch" as mentioned above.. if you burned wire, or resisters you were seriously overdriving them and they are shot i'm sure.. call ken S @ polk Customer service and see if they offer new drivers for replacement, let him know your a club polk member and you will get a discountMY HT RIG:
Sherwood p-965
Sherwood sd871 dvd
Rotel 1075 amp x5
LSI15 mains
LsiC center
LSIfx surround backs
Lsi7 side surrounds
SVS pb12/plus2
2 Channel Rig:
nad 1020 Pre-amp
Rotel 1080 stereo amp
Polk sda 2B
kenwood grunt Tuner
realistic lab 450 TT
Signal cable IC
