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Well - my speakers caught fire.

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That would have been a peavey 1516, the only way to destroy one of those 8" would be if a full range signal was sent into the "hi" biamp input. The xover in full range mode would usually protect that from happening, but perhaps overpowering it fried the cap and instead of shorting it became a straight connection, letting all the lows in.

Of course if they were using 2 cables to run it at 2 ohms like 2 separate cabs that is just asking for trouble. I plugged my bass350 into mine that way to hear what the 2x8 sounded like full range, and even in my apartment I was able to partially blow them to where they farted on low notes, but worked ok when ran with the crossover. I sold it after I found an 1810. The 10" scorpions handled a full range signal just fine and I actually rehearsed without the 18" plugged in as the norm due to the small space the band I was in had at the time. That wouldn't fly with the 8"s in a 1516. I had that rig for about 6 months before I upgraded to real cabs.

As for the op, fuzz pedals just make it harder to hear the power amp clipping, and+1 on worn ssurrounds on the speakers and dry caps in the head. Have the speakers reconed at speakerrepair.com, they do swr recones to original spec. Swr cabs are not usually improved by putting generic eminince 10's in, stick with swr spec.

And . consider picking up an swr head like a bass350 or basic 350, that has the limiter built in as a clip protector (limiter has a defeat push pull as opposed to a knob). There is one for sale here on the classifieds, a really clean basic350.

I have been using my bass 350 since 1998 and even though it technically under powers my goliath III and son of bertha, I have never had a problem. I also have good ears and could tell if my speakers were farting, since a limiter is not 100% protection.


Sweet! That'll be a great story one day.

I broke one in half once. Got called last minute to fill in with a band. They had a Peavey head and one of their cabs that had a 15 and two 8s in it. They kept telling me to turn up. I told them that I thought I was pushing their rig as it was. They got upset about it. I told them that if one of them wanted to turn it up they could but I wasn't touching it.

Sure enough, one of them cranked up the volume. I hit a low E and the top half of one of the 8s fell back into the cab. I thought that was awesome! Nobody else on stage was as impressed or fascinated as I was.
 
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Nice. One time at a gig it was raining really hard outside the bar we were playing at and there was a leak in the ceiling that started dripping our guitarist's pedalboard (it was one of those multieffects units and it was actually mine that he was borrowing) Anyway, the thing popped and sparked and blew a fuse in the bar and knocked out power to everything and they had to cancel the rest of the show lol.

I was pissed because I told the guitars beforehand not to put it somewhere where it could get wet.
 
Wow. That's a pretty good job.

You're probably right that it was one of your pedals, or a combination. Although I don't believe it was by fault of some malfunction. Loads of pedals, especially distortion related tend to send a higher average power to your speakers, therefore getting them hotter. By the first time you got smoke, they were done. Applying more power by way of a second head only did the job more completely.

Could it be that the pedal is generating some extra low (maybe even inaudible) freq that sent the soeakers into flambe mode?

You are seriously under-powering your cabs. The likely culprit is a clipped signal (to the point of DC) overheating the coils.

Where do you people come up with this stuff? Seriously?
 
This was the only part I dispute: " Although I don't believe it was by fault of some malfunction."

I believe two of the four speakers in the 410 were malfunctioning.

And I can certainly buy that there were speaker issues to start with. I was more referring to the fact that it didn't need to be an amp fault that killed speakers even with a 100w amp.
 
You'll note that what I said wasn't refuted. Compression can certainly raise the average power seen by the speakers.

It absolutely can and often does --because makeup gain. Here's one of about a zillion online references:

linked tutorial said:
Reduce the dynamic range on a signal. The dynamic range (when expressed in decibels, as is commonly done) is the difference between the loudest and the softest signal. If we attenuate the peaks out of signal, we are reducing its dynamic range. Since many devices are peak limited (power amplifiers, recorders), this allows us to increase the RMS level of the signal.

And Invalid Link Removed.