Strange phenomenon...

[theBadger]

Three of my speakers have suddenly developed flatulence.

Both my Electrovoice SBa 760 sub basses.... and one of my studio monitors now emit hilarious farting noises whenever I play bass notes thru them.

It is weird; like I'm being haunted by 'the farting speaker fairy'. Bass sounds that used to sound tight now sound like they are played thru a comb and paper.

Schplaaaarth... Phrateeerpth... Shhhhhhrurplethrurpleththth. These are the noises my speakers are making all of a sudden.

If it was one speaker I could understand; it's broken... but it's three now!

Does anyone have any idea what's going on? Please help before I run out of speakers.

tB.

[Audi01]

wow...current spikes? are they actually broken? sounds like they are :(

[alphatonez]

I personally have no idea, but maybe you find some hints in this thread:

http://www.talkbass.com/forum/f15/sp...arting-635520/

[dope]

did something happen prior to this ? like hot plugging an instrument through your system at high volume? or some other frequency spike that could have been damaging? it really doesnt make sense that all 3 blew at once.
perhaps there is a common culprit that is not the speakers themselves?
some sort of cross over or pre amp? maybe your actual sound card?
i would start looking at other sources in your sound chain before i write the speakers off as the culprit.

[theBadger]

Mystery solved: It was spiders!

There are spiders inside my speakers. There are spiders inside yours too.

Not these:


These:

There is a circular, corrugated, cardboard spring called a 'spider', usually yellow, in the back of a speaker. When it is damaged it causes a distinctive farty noise.

The spiders inside my subwoofers were both damaged and split, hence the flatulent distortion I was hearing.

More interesting was the theory put forward by the speaker-mending engineer about how they were damaged.

"Poor quality electricity," He told me. "Such as a lower than expected voltage, causes the amplifiers to under-perform. This means that they distort; producing a square wave rather than a smooth sine wave. The spiders can't react quickly enough to the square wave and tear."

My subwooofers had tears in their spiders and are now awaiting an expensive re-cone ...

and we have cancelled all our gigs at the club that caused the damage until they get their electricity sorted out.

tB.

[alphatonez]

tB, thanks for sharing that very interesting information with us.
Too bad the repair is expensive :(
Hope it won't take too long, until you can enjoy your gigs again.

[dope]

that really sucks :(
there has to be some sort of power conditioner your can run to help keep this from happening...