Inevitably, after a few months’ use, my speakers start to degrade: they distort extreme frequencies and loud sounds and finally start making that annoying faint staticky noise all the time. Recently, a deck-mounted speaker in my car literally disintegrated; the cone shattered into hundreds of tiny nylon flakes, which fell into the trunk. It doesn’t get colder than about 40 degrees where I live, and I play my music loud only occasionally.
Why do speakers break so often? In particular, why are speakers that come bundled with an amplifier (such as in a car stereo or a laptop) not strong enough to survive the loudest setting on the amplifier? I’ve had speakers “fuzz out” never having turned the volume past halfway.
To get the best tone you need thin membranes and especially in small speakers this makes them break because the radius is not great enough. It feeds back on itself.
BTW, most speakers ‘fuzz out’ because they’re not getting enough power to work correctly, not too much. Your stock car stereo puts out about 5-10w rms, 25w peak, and the speaker can probably handle up to about 25w rms (cheap car stereo speakers). It’s getting WAY too little power to make alot of noise. Same with laptop speakers.
Well, when addressing a large group of people, a person will often speak more loudly, which can tire out the voice. Often, their nerves will cause their mouth to go dry, so they have to run off to get a drink. Plus it gives the audience a chance to chat or visit the facilities.
(Okay, I am just trying to be funny, but I did come to this thread imagining it was about oral presentations and intermissions.)
I wonder if the speakers you buy are designed for the type of music you listen to.
If you listen to a lot of heavy rock you find that there is a lot of power directed to the middle and upper elements, in classical music you have more mid range, in rap or house loads of bass.
When the power output for speakers is quoted it is usually the sum total for all the elements so that a set of 100W speakers may only be able to handle less than, say, 50W through the bass cones.
Your amp makes no account of this though and so when you put on your Bob Marley stuff you get big pulses of power into those base elements.
There are two ways you can approach this, aprt from redicing the volume, you can buy speakers specifically designed for the type of music you play, or you can buy speakers with much greater power handling capacity, so imagine those 100W speakers being replaced by something like 250W ones.
To add to what Homer said, the most common cause of speaker damage is ‘clipping’ by an under-powered amp. When running the amp at the limit it can suddenly find itself with no reserves of power, output drops suddenly to zero and the speaker cone returns back with a thump.
Don’t forget that car speakers undergo far more extreme temperatures than home speakers, which will stress the materials far more and compound all the problems mentioned earlier.
It’s probably not the down-to-40-degrees part, it’s the up-to-140-degrees part in the middle of summer out in the parking lot. That’s gotta bake those suckers pretty bad.