Re: TI-H: Speakers...way OT
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Re: TI-H: Speakers...way OT
On Sat, 29 Apr 2000, Archon(David) wrote:
> The speakers in my living room aren't working right. They're kind of old,
> but the real problem (I think) is that the foam around the actual speaker
> has fallen apart and come out. Now there's a little bit of buzzing and
> stuff from the speakers on some songs (Trio's Da Da Da sounds like crap,
When the foam surround degrades (which is a common problem with speakers
as they age), the air that is supposed to be sealed in the box will be
leaking through the holes, which will have serious impact on the low
freqency response of the drivers.
A more serious issue is that the surround is an important part of the
driver suspension. A surround that no longer supports the cone will
result in a misaligned voice coil, which could rub on the motor structure.
Also, without uniform support, different areas of the cone will flex at
different rates, resulting in uncontrolled breakup (that is, different
parts of the cone moving independantly, not the pysical destruction of the
cone), which will also have serious impact on the sound quality.
You can buy kits to re-surround a driver, but if the voice coil is not
properly centered and shimmed during the process you can very easily end
up with a driver that is not correctly aligned, which could result in a
rubbing voice coil.
Changing the surround will shift the mechanical charactaristic of the
driver somewhat, for best results the driver parameters should be
rechecked and the enclosure parameters adjusted if necessary (internal
volume and port length might need adjusting for optimal performance).
However, this isn't something most people would notice without some fairly
accurate measuring equipment, so don't worry about it. If it was
something you needed to be concerned about with theses speakers, you
would alreadly have known the answer to your question :)
Often manufactures have replacement drivers for popular speaker models, if
the speakers were more than a few hundred dollars each, call the
manufacture and see if they have a replacement driver. If they were cheap
speakers, visit http://www.speakerpage.com and check out the selection of
raw drivers. There is probably something there that will work as a
drop-in replacement for your drivers.
DK
References: