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RF35 Crackling Tweeter, but the replacement didn't help :(


BillAustin

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I have an older set of RF35's I use in my primary movie theater room, great speakers but oneday I was driving them a bit hard and I heard one tower start to crackle.  I figured I blew a tweeter, and these are older so I decided to order up a new set and just fix them.   The replacement tweeters came and I swapped it out but the crackle was still there, tried the 2nd new tweeter just to confirm and again the crackle is still there.

 

Swapped the L/R connectors (to eliminate it being the receiver), and it's coming from that same tower, so at this point is it the crossover inside the speaker that's faulty or damaged?  Can I even get a replacement or is there anywhere that can rebuild mine? 

 

Lastly anything else that it could be?  The speaker itself sounds great until you plug in a tweeter new or original they just have a crackle blown sound to them on that one tower.

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4 hours ago, BillAustin said:

I have an older set of RF35's I use in my primary movie theater room, great speakers but oneday I was driving them a bit hard and I heard one tower start to crackle.  I figured I blew a tweeter, and these are older so I decided to order up a new set and just fix them.   The replacement tweeters came and I swapped it out but the crackle was still there, tried the 2nd new tweeter just to confirm and again the crackle is still there.

 

Swapped the L/R connectors (to eliminate it being the receiver), and it's coming from that same tower, so at this point is it the crossover inside the speaker that's faulty or damaged?  Can I even get a replacement or is there anywhere that can rebuild mine? 

 

Lastly anything else that it could be?  The speaker itself sounds great until you plug in a tweeter new or original they just have a crackle blown sound to them on that one tower.

If you want to take it a step further remove and swap crossovers to see if the problem follows the crossover or not. If it is the crossover Crites can rebuild them they are very reasonably priced and usually have a quick turn around.

 

https://critesspeakers.com/crossovers.html

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You would be surprised how many amplifiers misbehave with real reactive speaker loads especially when pushed hard. Capacitors voltage/power handling is de-rated by more than half the higher in frequency you go. You can easily damage crossover parts with too much high frequency energy. This doesn't have to be audible and most of the time isn't because the spurious oscillations and high distortion at high frequencies that chew up crossover parts and tweeters are well above human hearing. Another reason I care less about hf bandwidth specs or more importantly to have an unconditionally stable amplifier.

 

Side note:

 

Amplifiers are tested on the bench with purely resistive loads. Thorough engineers with good designs have enough phase margin to be unconditionally stable and is put through reactive load testing to ensure stability. You would be amazed how many amps I have tested that misbehave on even slightly capacitive loads.

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If captainbeefheart's theory is correct, there's a simple way to protect your tweeters. Remove the jumper strap between the low and high frequency section at the input terminals, and install a fuse on one leg. A simple Ohm's Law calculation should be able to tell you what the fuse should be rated for.

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38 minutes ago, Peter P. said:

If captainbeefheart's theory is correct, there's a simple way to protect your tweeters. Remove the jumper strap between the low and high frequency section at the input terminals, and install a fuse on one leg. A simple Ohm's Law calculation should be able to tell you what the fuse should be rated for.

Just be certain to connect the speaker wire to the low frequency binding posts.

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