Can you degrade your monitors by overloadin them with low freqs?

  • Thread starter Thread starter VirtualSamana
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VirtualSamana

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I am curious if I did any damage to my monitors (JBL LSR25ps)over the long term. I was playing a bass heavy track and by mistake set the levels to high and pumped out this extreeemly loud distorted bass. It hurt my ears and reminded me why I usually route the outs on my soundcard through my mixer (I like having physical control over my levels) Anywho this happened about three times (stupid, stupid, stupid). I am not noticing any difference at this point but am curious if you can shorten the life span of your monitors by playing extreeemly loud (to the point of serious nasty distortion) low frequencies through them. I know it's not a good idea but what exactly happens to the speakers/drivers etc. when you do this and they don't blow out?
 
Blowing speakers normally happens at once, but not always. It's possible to do harm in increments which will eventually lead to a blown speaker.

Personally if I'm gonna blow a speaker I prefer the fused voice coil method.
 
i know with the mackie hr824s there is some kind of limiting protecting the drivers from being ripped apart. I only got it loud enough once to hear it engage, not only was the music extremely loud but as you could imagine the limiter is not a very musical one, that sound like SHIT.

I dont know about your speaker model, but hopefully that terrible distortion was limiting, not anything damaging.

I was playing 50 cent, and had the mixer a zero, but with all the bass and peak limiting in that music the speakers overloaded even without my meters going into the red.
 
try playing a sinussweep (20-20K) over them. If any damage is done, it should become obvisious....or damage to your ears:D
 
If the speaker is damaged, it will distort at certain frequencies.....a sinussweep from 20-20K will have all the frequencies in it, so ...blablabla


I'm drunk....I will try to explaintomorrow.....
 
Thanks to King, Sub and Down for the advice.

Down - How do I do the sinussweep? Is their a program that does this or do i have to resort to getting snot all over my speakers ;)
 
Ok, 8 hours later and things are more clear now...

the sinussweep is a test tone that starts at 20herz, and sweep up to 20.000herz.

It sound like....wwwwwwwwhhhhhhhhhooooooooeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

If the speaker is damaged it will resonate or distort at a certain frequency. If it gives a clean signal all the way you're pretty much safe.

The testtone can be found on almost every test cd there is, and if you don't have one, someone from this board should be able to provide you with one. I'm not at the studio right now, but I will be later and get the tone. I will email it to you....(note to other bbs'ers...I tend to forget things like this...so if anybody else has the tone by hand please provide it..:D )
 
Hey, don't know:confused:

If didn't even think about that...might have been confusion indeed. in holland it's called a sinussweep, but I guess you call it sine sweep. We for example have kroketten but i guess you call them different also. ;)

Anyway, I have the AIFF file, but it's 5.2 megs.....and get ready for this..no option on my laptop to convert it into mp3.....WAY TO GO...a 56 (!) track studio owner and I can't even convert a AIFF into mp3 at home with the current software!

:rolleyes:
 
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