Playing the modular through my home stereo

[Tim Ressel]

John,

It is very bad for speakers if the levels are high enough. The problem in your
case, believe it or not, was the high frequency content of the square wave. Even
though it was a 5hz signal, the harmonics reach way above the cutoff for the
driver. Whenever a driver sees a signal that is too fast for the driver to
respond to, the cone/diaphram just sits there, and the voice coil absorbs all of
the energy in the form of heat. Enought heat you'll be buying $150 diaphrams for
your Altec 804B's. By the way, this is why we use crossovers for n-way systems.
Those woofers will not much the highs.

Tim Ressel--Compliance Engineer
Hewlett-Packard
Verifone Division
916-630-2541  
tim_r1 at verifone.com                     



-----Original Message-----
From: JWBarlow at aol.com [mailto:JWBarlow at aol.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2000 7:45 PM
To: synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl
Subject: Re: Playing the modular through my home stereo



In a message dated 3/1/2000 3:47:11 PM, pfperry at melbpc.org.au writes:

>Only time I blew the speakers out, I was using a r*land
>D*gital soundcanvas card & running a midi file shifted
>down 4 octaves.
>This gave very low freq square waves.. I couldn't hear 
>anything except this 'clicking' sound.. thought the gain was
>too low.. turned out what I was hearing was the cones bottoming
>out on squarewaves at 5 Hz or so.

What I've wondered about for a long time is the effect of instantaneous 
transitions on speakers (even in the audio range). It seems hard enough to 
get electrons to move like saw and square waves, let alone speaker cones. 
Anyone know how traumatic this is for speakers?

John Barlow