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Another blown speaker

J

joeybcdt

May 6, 2004
143
1
SE Texas
#1
I bought a Schroeder 1210 about 3 years ago and I still love it. For the first year or so I used a GK 700RB and then a QSC PLX1602 with various preamps. Never a problem.

Then I laid out for a while. During this time I bought a Mesa Walkabout and sold the other amps. Now I'm playing again and I've blown 2 speakers in a matter of months. First the 10" then the 12". I haven't blown a speaker since I was 12 years old.

Jorg's customer service has been great as usual but I have to quit blowing speakers. Is the Walkabout under-powered? Should I shop for another amp? When I bought the Mesa, Thunderfunk was my 2nd choice.

Thanks,
Joey
 
#3
An underpowered amp, driven to clipping, might blow your tweeter, in a passively crossed system, but it won't blow your woofer.

It's not the clipped wave form that does the damage; it's too much power.

Ugh, I grow fatigued; this subject has been done to death. Search here, and in googles newsgroups, especialy alt.audio.pro.live-sound
 
#6
ulrich said:
An underpowered amp, driven to clipping, might blow your tweeter, in a passively crossed system, but it won't blow your woofer.

It's not the clipped wave form that does the damage; it's too much power.
Click to expand...

Yes, that is what I ways taught. But the Mesa is about 300wRMS and the Schroeder 1210 is rated over 800wRMS. When I ran my QSC PLX I ran it bridged at 4ohm. That was about 1600wRMS and never a problem.
 
#7
somethings going on, cause i run my 1210 about 2-4 times a week with my gibson gb440. loud 3 piece rock/funk band. never a problem. actually i did blow a tweet about 6 months ago, but then i retofitted the cab with a selenium dt150 which i was planning on doing anyway. my head is 400 watts btw.
 
#8
joeybcdt said:
...Jorg's customer service has been great as usual but I have to quit blowing speakers. Is the Walkabout under-powered?..
Joey
Click to expand...

FWIW:

What's Jorg got to say about it? My speaker repair guy says the vast majority of his blown speaker repairs come from under-powered amps not over-powered.

Don't think you can draw parallels between general amp/speaker watt and blown speakers. Different amps, different speakers, different settings, different chain, different player, different playing conditions - all factors that can vary tremendously what someone is pumping into speakers to amplify the tone to desired output.

If you have your amp checked out or happen to know it's in good working order, what's left as the source?
 
#9
luknfur said:
FWIW:

My speaker repair guy says the vast majority of his blown speaker repairs come from under-powered amps not over-powered.
Click to expand...

The more I read on TB, the more that this makes sense. I wonder why so many people think that the opposite is true.

I wish this would be part of the FAQ or in a sticky somewhere. Maybe it is.

As for the woofer/tweeter thing, I can see how the higher ranged spkr might be more likely to blow, but I'm sure it's not true 100% of the time. Also, a ten is not a tweeter.
 
#10
luknfur said:
FWIW:

What's Jorg got to say about it? My speaker repair guy says the vast majority of his blown speaker repairs come from under-powered amps not over-powered.
Click to expand...

The amp may be underpowered, but the speaker blew, because it got too much power for too long. It's all about power, and the drivers ability to shed it as heat. The speaker doesn't give a rats arse if the signal is hifi, clipped, square, or early 90's industrial with heinous digital clipping.

We may be looking at a chicken and egg, semantics situation. The speaker may indeed blow when the underpowered amp is clipping. But, it's the power the amp is making, and not the clipping that does the damage.

Perhaps the nasty clipped sound from the amp, masks the unhappy sounds that the speaker is making, and people fail to turn down. If you have way too GD much power, and you hear distortion, you know it's the driver crying uncle.

And, of course overconfidence. Having an underpowered amp could lead to careless cranking.


Don't think you can draw parallels between general amp/speaker watt and blown speakers. Different amps, different speakers, different settings, different chain, different player, different playing conditions - all factors that can vary tremendously what someone is pumping into speakers to amplify the tone to desired output.
Click to expand...

Agreed.
 
#12
joeybcdt said:
I bought a Schroeder 1210 about 3 years ago and I still love it. For the first year or so I used a GK 700RB and then a QSC PLX1602 with various preamps. Never a problem.

Then I laid out for a while. During this time I bought a Mesa Walkabout and sold the other amps. Now I'm playing again and I've blown 2 speakers in a matter of months. First the 10" then the 12". I haven't blown a speaker since I was 12 years old.

Jorg's customer service has been great as usual but I have to quit blowing speakers. Is the Walkabout under-powered? Should I shop for another amp? When I bought the Mesa, Thunderfunk was my 2nd choice.

Thanks,
Joey
Click to expand...

You must be playing pretty loud to drive the Walkabout into clipping. I thought the Schroeders were efficient speakers. I can get earsplitting volume out of any efficient 2-10 with mine. And I can probably blow one if I boost at just the right frequencies.

You do have to watch the EQ on the Walkabout. That parametric is capable of some extreme boost as well as cut and if you've been trying to warm up the sound of the Schroeder with it and got a little careless, that might have done it.
 
#13
Has your repair tech tested the output of the amp yet? Has he tested the impedance of the speaker system yet? Things can go wrong with good equipment, especially after it has sat for a while.

As someone else posted...here we go again...

It could be the amp is putting out an unusual waveform (insert clipped here) and the overworking of the coil to stop forward progress so quickly and reverse it to backward progress (and vice-versa) is overworking the coil, creating heat which then makes it that much worse and soon you have coil soup.
 
#14
Alaska Bass said:
It could be the amp is putting out an unusual waveform (insert clipped here) and the overworking of the coil to stop forward progress so quickly and reverse it to backward progress (and vice-versa) is overworking the coil, creating heat which then makes it that much worse and soon you have coil soup.
Click to expand...

Aside from that being an extremely rare possiblilty, a waveform of that sort would not only kill the driver, it would kill your ears. What's more likely is that the drivers were simply overpowered with high level transient peaks, which any decent amp is quite capable of generating at levels at least four times that of its nominal rating. Bottom line, a 2x cab is only capable of so much. Chronic blown drivers means you're simply asking too much of them, and you need more speaker output capability.
 
#15
billfitzmaurice said:
Aside from that being an extremely rare possiblilty, a waveform of that sort would not only kill the driver, it would kill your ears. What's more likely is that the drivers were simply overpowered with high level transient peaks, which any decent amp is quite capable of generating at levels at least four times that of its nominal rating. Bottom line, a 2x cab is only capable of so much. Chronic blown drivers means you're simply asking too much of them, and you need more speaker output capability.
Click to expand...

That makes a lot of sense to me. In my case then, my 300 watt head could put out transient peaks hitting 1200 watts. That's enough to damge just about any 2X speaker cabinet out there. In fact, recently I blew an 8 ohm 1-15 rated at 300 watts even though my amp is only rated to put out about 165 watts at that impedance. I believe I was using a little too much boost below 100hz. Fried the voice coil in short order, even though the amp didn't sound in any kind of distress.
 
#16
62bass said:
. Fried the voice coil in short order, even though the amp didn't sound in any kind of distress.
Click to expand...
I haven't popped a driver in use since 1971, but I did toast an EVM15B a few years back while testing a cab. I was using a 100 watt or so amp, with a signal generator source, and I had the generator output set 10dB above where I should have. I also had the amp volume up when I turned the generator on, so it put out a 500 watt or so transient pulse that toasted the coil so fast that I wasn't even aware of it happening.
 

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