4 of my 5 klipsch quintet speakers have stopped working

[patjgk 0]

So I bought a set of quintet speakers + sub around 3 years ago.

 

I used them for 2 years hooked up to a pioneer receiver, mostly listening to music and watching movies with them. Then they went into storage for a year or so while our house was being renovated. 

 

I went to test them today, and at first I thought my receiver was broken. But having done all of the usual diagnostic tests (swapping speakers, swapping channels, swapping receivers, checking receiver settings), I have come to the conclusion that the center speaker + 3 of the satellites are not working. One works fine and sounds great regardless of which channel I plug it into. The others are completely 100% tinny and high pitched and quiet, like only the tweeter is working and the woofers are not working at all. 

 

What are the likely causes for this? And is there any way to fix it myself? The foam around the woofers looks fine on all of the speakers and there is no other visually obvious problem.

 

Thanks for your help

[BornAgain 1]

Can you pull a woofer and test it directly?  

 

My first thought is maybe nice or something made nests in them. Don’t know if that’s an issue in your basement or not, but I’ve seen it before. 

[WMcD 597]

I don't know.  It seems you went through a set of exhaustive tests.

 

Please let us have the model.  II or II or IV, etc.

 

I'd suggest you check for a mechanical issue: Press gently on the small woofers and determine if they are binding as compared to the one which is working.  It seems farfetched but maybe storage in a hot environment messed up something. 

 

The next test should be electrical. You'll need a multimeter to test the d.c. resistance at the input terminals.  It should show about 4 to 8 ohms. If the voice coils of the woofers are burned out the meter will show whatever it does on "resistance" with the probes not touching. 

 

Burned out voice coils is usually some sort of overload.  In a home theater situation I'd think the amp should be set so the little speakers are set to "small" to keep deep bass out of them.  

 

I know this implies some lack of care by you, but bear with me.  Maybe you had used the collection with the HT set to large and blew the little woofers but did not realize it because the sub was working.  

 

Add by edit:  It is a touchstone of trouble shooting to look for whatever changed before the issue arose.  In this situation it seems to be storage.  Or maybe wiring after storage.  Still, I wonder whether everything was working well before going into storage.

 

Very mysterious.

 

Best,

 

WMcD