Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo State of Paranoia

Thank you for your insight. I frequent these message boards and have always found sound advice. I have pushed my reciever (Sony DE-545 100W) on several occasions to it's maximum with my M60's. I didn't hear any type of distortion, however, I will cease pushing my reciever to the max in the future. I DO NOT want to damage my M60's as you can imagine. Hopefully, I have not already damaged my speakers in my ignorance. They still sound as great as they did before.
One more question and then I will keep my big yap shut for a while...Does clipping over time destroy a speaker or can only a few mintutes of clipping destroy a speaker?

If clipping is severe, a few seconds are enough to fry the voice coils. If it's brief, a fraction of a second, and not severe, I doubt there would be any damage.

Regards,

Is it pretty obvious when the voice coils have been fried? I mean do the speakers sound horrible...do they work at all?

Usually they don't work at all, though sometimes the overheated voice coil will warp the voice-coil former (if the wires in the voice coil haven't shorted out) and you'll hear a scraping or buzzing sound as the former rubs against the magnet pole piece.

Likewise, sometimes speakers that are overdriven by boosted bass (assuming you aren't running a subwoofer), the woofer voice coil will hit the magnet structure with a sharp "snap" sound. Depending on the driver, this may also warp the voice coil so that it then scrapes on any heavy excursion bass note.

I recall this happening during tests of a quite interesting omnidirectional speaker from dbx, called the Soundfield, which bottomed its woofers when we played Dire Strait's Ride Across the River at higher listening levels. Several woofers had to be replaced to continue our tests for the magazine at the time.

Regards,

Interesting-- so this would lead to the conclusion that speaker damage is

1. Pretty much all-or-nothing, and
2. Sometimes the damage only shows up when the speaker is driven hard?

Or, put in the negative,
1. Very rarely does subtle-yet-meaningful damage occur, and
2. speaker damage very rarely affects moderate listening levels?

A friend just walked in and before he saw what I was doing, he said "You're out of your element! You have no frame of reference!" Is he right, or is what I said feasible?

Mike

I dunno about what you said, but your roommate seems pretty cool.