Surround Speaker "crackles" (1 Viewer)

[Chris Baucom]

Okay, I am not a speaker expert, so maybe someone can point me in the right direction. Last night, while watching Saving Private Ryan on DTS DVD, one of my rear surround speakers (Boston Acoustics CR6) had a pretty consistent "crackle" to it. This happened mostly during scenes containing lots of low frequency sounds, like rumbles, explosions, etc. I opened up the speaker but couldn't find any visible damage.

Is this indicative of a tear or other physical damage, or could it be perhaps a wire or something internal to the speaker making contact with the bass cone? Any suggestions?

I swapped the rear speakers left-channel to right-channel, and it is definitely isolated to the speaker, not the speaker wiring or the receiver.

Thanks for any help you can give!

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

I opened up the speaker but couldn't find any visible damage.

Speakers rarely show “physical” evidence when damaged by program content. You have to know what to do to check them out.

Try gently pushing the cone of the suspect woofer. If you hear a scraping sound, the woofer is damaged – blown, for all practical purposes. (Make sure your fingers are around the edge in a symmetrical fashion, to induce linear cone movement. If you push only one side of the cone that will misalign the voice coil and cause a scraping sound, even in a good driver.)

Another way to check for a damaged woofer is to feed it a simple program – like a male voice – and play it at a low volume. If you hear a buzzing sound, the driver is blown.

The crossover could also be the problem. That’s a little trickier to check. You would have to swap out the drivers from a known good speaker into the suspect one. (Of course, you won’t want to do this if the speakers are in warranty.) If the second set of drivers exhibit the same problems, that would indicate the crossover.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Chris Baucom]

Thanks for your help, Wayne! I'll give it a shot.