Are My Speakers Blown?

Come home from a long weekend away to find your speakers just don't sound right? Here's how to tell if your speakers are blown.

Are My Speakers Blown?

Today we're going to talk about how you figure out if your speakers are blown, and blown is not a technical term. Blown is a term people use when their speakers either stop working altogether or they start sounding funny or weird. So sometimes if you have a party and there's a lot of people, it gets noisy. Somebody turns the volume up and up and up and at some point, the next day, you're listening to your system and something either doesn't sound right or doesn't make any noise at all.

So when people use the term, blown, for speakers, it means that either something has been damaged or the speaker itself is no longer working because it's been overdriven which can be a result of mechanical stress. The woofers and the tweeters are moving too far, further than they're designed to move, or it can actually be due to heat burning out the voice coil wire.

At that point, one or all of the drivers will stop working completely but that's pretty obvious. So how do you know if something else is going on? All of a sudden you might hear a strange noise, it can be a rubbing sound that causes a crackling which can only occur on certain notes with certain music or it can occur all the time.

You might hear from a tweeter, for instance, you might hear a buzzing sound or a slight rattling sound. All of these things can be indications that something in the speaker has been overdriven. Now, a good question is how do you prevent this from happening? Well, your ears are a real good gauge of when the speaker is being overdriven, either the speaker is not happy or the amplifier driving it is not happy.

And it will sound very, very distorted, very harsh, very thin, very bright. That's an indication that you should probably turn things down, otherwise, you might cause damage to your speaker or to your amplifier. If you've experienced one of these issues where a drive unit in your speaker is not working or is making a strange noise that wasn't there before a party or before some incident, you can always call the company that made your loudspeakers.

It's very easy to replace them. In most cases, the connectors are push-on connectors for the wiring and if you can use a screwdriver, you can replace a part in your speakers.



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