R.I.P. 15" Titanic (1 Viewer)

It tis a sad day for me. Last night, while playing music just entirely too loud, she bit the dust. I heard a weird noise, similar to a noise made when i've purpously toasted a speaker, I immediatly cut the music. I looked at the port, and noticed smoke rolling out. I ran to get a screw driver, and quickly pulled the sub out, and smoke just poured out of the box. The voice coil is definetly toasted. My bedroom will smell like this for months.

Just a warning to those of you running a titanic over the RMS rating. Be nice to it while playing it musically, even during a movie. I'm running mine with 1000 rms, and I can honestly say thats just too much power for the poor thing. I ran two of the 15" titanics in my car setup, and i beat the holy hell out of them, never gave me any problems feeding them a little under RMS.

If you push it to its limits, its gonna push back, in a bad way

At least it was in the line of duty Too much power usually isn't the problem, but it sounds like you were just pushing it top hard. RMS isn't what you need to worry about, it's peak.

if you're using a subwoofer for theater purpouses and not running it musically, it can probably safely run near the peak. but when being used for music, running it over rms is dangerous. peak is ok with theater because its only receiving that much power in short bursts, where as when playing music, its almost constantly receiving the power, which is why it should be run at RMS

correct me if i'm wrong, but thats what i've gathered from what reading i've done. (and yes i know i suck at trying to explain things)

Just how loud did you listened to ask the amp to produce a 1000W continiously. And what type of music? An Organ spectecular?

I was going to say.. what was this an outside block party or something? or are we totally deaf and just love to feel it.

How exactly are you determining what you are running it at? If you have the amp up to 100% and really crank it, you could see peaks well above what the driver is capable of. Even at 50% gain though, you could still see instantaneous peaks, regardless of what you are playing, that spike up above what the driver can handle. When you start driving the amp to major distortion or when the driver is beyond it's physical capability, that is when you fry voice coils.

When i first set it up, i did quite a bit of testing to monitor how loud it'd have to be to make the amp clip. I set the gain on the amp a touch above half, and turned all the volume's to full on my laptop, and monitored at what volumes on the receiver would cause the amp to clip with all sorts of different kinds of music.

While it was in the process of blowing, I watched for the amplifier to clip, and it never lit up once. thats why i feel that it was just too much power for musical purpouses for the driver to handle. isnt it also true that subs have better power handling when they're sealed compared to not being able to handle power as well when ported? (note: it was running ported at 20 hz.) as for what i was playing, i was playing test tones, strait frequencies for part of the time, and heavy bass tracks for the rest of the time. i've done worse to my car setup (same subs) and they took it like a champ.

If you played sine waves,at high volumes for a long time, I can see now why the voicecoil over heated.As you can see it's not adviseable to do this.

oops... lol

at least i know its limits now, god this sucks, why am i laughing

In a car it is a small volume to fill so you reach high SPLs a lot sooner. Sealed requires more power to achive a given SPL usually, but it depends on the design and the driver itself. It does sound like you were just pushing it so hard that the VC couldn't take it.