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Topic: replace old good sound, cheap studio monitors? (Read 3887 times) previous topic - next topic
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replace old good sound, cheap studio monitors?

Hi Audio people, I have a question for yall. Right now I have a sound setup that I think sounds pretty good.  I have mostly flac audio playing through my creative x-fi sound card to a very old Sharp 30 watt amp and a pair of 50$ sony bookshelf speakers.  Every time I hear them it sounds better than the last persons stereo Iv listened to and the bass is surprising for these kind of speakers and no sub.  I don't know what the problem is with my tweeters tho.  I bought some new sony SS B 1000's to replace the old tweeters in my older model of the same speakers (one screw and hot glue worked since it was bigger) and now I'm getting the same problem...  I don't know if its the crossover in one of the speaker boxes or if its my amp because ive blown out (or whatever you call it) only one tweeter in the same pair of speakers twice and I swap the speakers (L/R) sometimes.  Basically no sound comes out of one tweeter unless you push on it a certain way and I made a post about this before I replaced my tweeters but this is happening on the same speaker box (i think) and with the newer tweeter.  So I'm thinking I'm gonna put-the speakers i bought back together and try to exchange them.  Would you hook up the new working 50$ speakers to the same amp and hope it doesn't happen again or would you try and sell them and spend a little more on studio monitors.  I'm kinda sold on M-Audio but I need somebody to back me up or redirect me, http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/StudiophileAV30.html these ones are the same wattage is my amp so it could be better or worse than what I have already have.  If i got these ones I might go for the 40 watt pair.  I'm just a desk listener but I still take my 30 watts is loud is it goes sometimes and it gets pretty bassy and loud at that point right before it distorts.  If someone were to say that yeah these 30watt studio moniters sound really crisp and they have decent bass than maybe I would go for them but if there weak and might disappoint me I don't want them.  I don't know much about these  Sorry I don't know how these studio monitors could be compared to my setup and I don't know how to describe the amount of loudness and goodness that my setup has . Right now I'm using the same model speakers but I blended a old one with a new one in order to have 2 working tweeters and my woofers arnt even matching.

replace old good sound, cheap studio monitors?

Reply #1 –
You might want to consider upgrading your amp. The #1 cause of blown tweeters is underpowering. It causes you to push the amp into clipping which generates high-freq harmonics and other nasties. Older vintage amps and receivers, such as the likes from Pioneer, Sansui, Technics, et al, can be found on the "bay", and at Goodwill/Thrift Stores for a song. I just snagged a nice old Technics amp not too long ago on eBay for 0.50-cents. $10 - $40 is not unusual for some cool old stuff.

replace old good sound, cheap studio monitors?

Reply #2 –
Quote from: Artie on
You might want to consider upgrading your amp.


So far so good.

Quote
The #1 cause of blown tweeters is under powering.


Unfortunately that is an audiophile myth.  The number one cause of blown tweeters is sending them too much power.

An underpowered amplifier is a possible cause for this, but only in an indirect way that presumes that you can't hear really bad amplifier clipping and respond to it by turning down the volume. 

Quote
It causes you to push the amp into clipping which generates high-freq harmonics and other nasties.


It takes so much clipping to send excess power to the tweeters that the bad sound should have stopped you from advancing the volume control that far long before there was any tweeter damage.

It is possible that your old amp has some kind of internal fault that causes it to send out bursts of ultrasonic  ringing when you turn it up, and that may be what us killing your speakers. This is different from clipping because clipping always produces spurious responses at both high, medium, and low frequencies.  Clipping can even reduce the percentage of high frequencies from what it was without clipping. That's one reason why clipping can make music sound like mud.

The more predictable outcome of clipping is that it can allow an amplifier to deliver more power to the speakers than the amplifier is rated at. For example an amplifier that puts out 50 watts without clipping might put out 100 watts or more when clipped.  This gets you back to my first claim, which is that the number one cause of blown speakers is sending them too much power. 

I know of no better way to send speakers too much power than hooking up an even larger amplifier!

Quote
Older vintage amps and receivers, such as the likes from Pioneer, Sansui, Technics, et al, can be found on the "bay", and at Goodwill/Thrift Stores for a song. I just snagged a nice old Technics amp not too long ago on eBay for 0.50-cents. $10 - $40 is not unusual for some cool old stuff.


The real truth is that there are some really good amplifiers in reasonably cheap receivers such as those made by Sherwood and Sony. I've  tested some of them with both resistive and speaker loads on the bench and they can deliver some amazingly good power for the incredible $0.50 per watt or less that they cost. Old amps are big and heavy and that suits some people's intuition, but its more likely that new equipment is in good shape then legacy stuff.

Taking tweeters out of new speakers to fix up old speakers that may have always been worse than the new speakers makes no sense to me. If you want to buy raw tweeters, check out Parts Express, MCM electronics  and Madisound.

Also, you need to face up to the fact that good sound always costs a little money. Buying powered speakers from a known quality source makes a lot of sense when both your existing amps and speakers are questionable. Throwing good money after bad, putting new wine in old skins, and patching old clothing with new patches are not usually  good ideas. Wisely spending money on transducers (headphones and speakers) is generally your best investment if the rest of your system is already pretty reasonable.


replace old good sound, cheap studio monitors?

Reply #3 –
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Unfortunately that is an audiophile myth.  The number one cause of blown tweeters is sending them too much power.


But it isn't a myth if you consider a few of your next points:

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
1. An underpowered amplifier is a possible cause for this, but only in an indirect way that presumes that you can't hear really bad amplifier clipping and respond to it by turning down the volume. 
2. It takes so much clipping to send excess power to the tweeters that the bad sound should have stopped you from advancing the volume control that far long before there was any tweeter damage.
3. The more predictable outcome of clipping is that it can allow an amplifier to deliver more power to the speakers than the amplifier is rated at. For example an amplifier that puts out 50 watts without clipping might put out 100 watts or more when clipped.


I'm guessing that you've never been an audio tech in a small midwestern town. (I decided not to say "redneck" town in deference to the many nice folks there.)
In a small town, it was not unusual to actually go to a customers house, to listen to how they were using their system, in order to try to determine why they kept blowing something. I was amazed to hear how many times they would "dime" the volume control. ("If it goes to 10, I ought to be able to use it to 10 . . . right?") 
Take this x2 for car stereos! Thus, in answer to your points #1 and #2, they didn't hear really bad clipping, and it didn't stop them from advancing the volume control beyond the point of torturing the system.

So, in answer to point #3, it was their underpowered amp that put out too much power and something had to let go. The tweeter generally being the most delicate component in the system.

One of my favorite stories, from that era: There was this young kid, (18-ish), who was trying to use one of those God-awful car stereo "boosters", that were so prevalent in the mid-to-late '70's, to get a powerful car system. Again, he would "dime" the controls, and the sound was damn near a square wave. (He thought it sounded good, but wanted more power.) I asked him to check out my system. I had one of those import pick-em-ups at the time. (The small-town verbiage was rubbing off on me.) 
I had a nice head unit at the time, (Concord, I believe), tri-amped, with a Yamaha 3-way electronic x-over. I had tweeters mounted on the dash, midrange in the doors, and custom woofer cabinets that fit in front of the seat, under your legs, filled with Peerless woofers. It was a pretty amazing system for the times. I cranked it up about as loud as it would go, but still remain clean. He listened for a moment, then leaned over to say something. I could see his lips move, but couldn't hear a thing even though he was shouting a few inches from my ear. I turned the volume down. He said, "Is that all the louder it goes?" 

He equated distortion with power. I could have had 1/10th the power, driven it to 80%THD, and he would have been more impressed.

Anecdotal, I know, but you'ld be amazed how many times that same scenario played out, in one form or another. (Then again, with your experience, maybe you wouldn't.)

Artie
 

replace old good sound, cheap studio monitors?

Reply #4 –
Quote from: Artie on
Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
Unfortunately that is an audiophile myth.  The number one cause of blown tweeters is sending them too much power.


But it isn't a myth if you consider a few of your next points:

Quote from: Arnold B. Krueger on
1. An underpowered amplifier is a possible cause for this, but only in an indirect way that presumes that you can't hear really bad amplifier clipping and respond to it by turning down the volume. 
2. It takes so much clipping to send excess power to the tweeters that the bad sound should have stopped you from advancing the volume control that far long before there was any tweeter damage.
3. The more predictable outcome of clipping is that it can allow an amplifier to deliver more power to the speakers than the amplifier is rated at. For example an amplifier that puts out 50 watts without clipping might put out 100 watts or more when clipped.


I'm guessing that you've never been an audio tech in a small Midwestern town. (I decided not to say "redneck" town in deference to the many nice folks there.)


Why would it matter?

Quote
In a small town, it was not unusual to actually go to a customers house, to listen to how they were using their system, in order to try to determine why they kept blowing something. I was amazed to hear how many times they would "dime" the volume control. ("If it goes to 10, I ought to be able to use it to 10 . . . right?") 
Take this x2 for car stereos! Thus, in answer to your points #1 and #2, they didn't hear really bad clipping, and it didn't stop them from advancing the volume control beyond the point of torturing the system.


I never said that  nobody can tolerate amazingly high levels of clipping.

With real world humans, virtually all things are possible! ;-)

What I said is that ignoring that much clipping is required to change the spectrum of music. Furthermore I said that sometimes hard clipping actually decreases the amount of high frequency energy in reproduced music. Both of these are simply facts of science.

Quote
So, in answer to point #3, it was their underpowered amp that put out too much power and something had to let go. The tweeter generally being the most delicate component in the system.


But you've ignored at least 3 points:

Quote
A. It is possible that your old amp has some kind of internal fault that causes it to send out bursts of ultrasonic ringing when you turn it up, and that may be what us killing your speakers. This is different from clipping because clipping always produces spurious responses at both high, medium, and low frequencies. Clipping can even reduce the percentage of high frequencies from what it was without clipping. That's one reason why clipping can make music sound like mud.

B: The more predictable outcome of clipping is that it can allow an amplifier to deliver more power to the speakers than the amplifier is rated at. For example an amplifier that puts out 50 watts without clipping might put out 100 watts or more when clipped. This gets you back to my first claim, which is that the number one cause of blown speakers is sending them too much power.

C: I know of no better way to send speakers too much power than hooking up an even larger amplifier!


I know of very few "success stores" for the low powered amplifier myth, where people upgraded just their amplifier and stopped frying tweeters. I know of a number of failure stores, where people bought bigger amps and started frying speakers that used to be OK.

If you're talking about Joe six pack type people, if they clipped out a small amp, there's a good chance that they will also clip out a bigger amp.

Remember, it takes 10 times more power to create the subjective impression of sound that is twice as loud. If you have a standard 100 wpc amp, that means 1,000 wpc. I don't think your standard Best Buy type store even stocks any of those.  As a rule you have to go to a music store or pro audio store to find amps like that and they cost you a pretty penny.




replace old good sound, cheap studio monitors?

Reply #5 –
In regards to the original poster, you need to listen to some decent speakers, as it seems like you aren't even in the same town that good audio lives in, and I am saying this from the perspective of $10 swap meet speakers on my desk with no more than 20 watts total power (old Cambridge Audio PCworks http://www.audioreview.com/cat/speakers/fl...59_1594crx.aspx ).

I suggest looking at some of the decent subwoofer satellite designs, almost all decent sounding cheap speakers use this configuration. Cheaper units will have the power for all speakers in the sub box, and more expensive ones will only power the subwoofer and require the use of an amp to drive the left and right speaker. What is critical is that the signal to the power stage of the left and right speaker has the bass filtered to go only to the subwoofer.

Once you have listened to some better systems how to proceed may be a lot clearer.


Regards the blowing of tweeters ... If they get too hot, they tend to fail. How they get too hot depends on a lot of factors, but during good sounding clean output isn't likely one of them, unless the crossover point is very low, the crossover slope not very steep (like -6db/oct from just a blocking capacitor), or the components are mismatched in power handling. Tweeters usually don't blow from a lot of power as long as its for a VERY short duration, like the peak of a cymbal whack, they blow from heating, rms power, power that stays far above the normal level for tweeters for a longer than normal span of time.

*** If the OP had a blown blocking capacitor in his speaker crossover, shorted, that would blow tweeters immediately, and maybe without much audible notice.