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My band had to use different speaker cabinets for our gig this weekend. One of our band members has a pair of sound techs dual 15" w/horn and a pair of single 15" sound techs w/ horn. The speakers are around 12 years old and had been in a storage unit with no heat or ac for most of the past 4 years. We hooked them up mono into Alesis EQ, dbx crossover, hi-mids out, to Mackie 800 watt amp for the duals, Nady 800 watt for the singles. We had a lot of people at our gig including other musicians telling me the sound was great! I was worried because we didnt
have much time to setup and test the different cabs. We had another player friend get up to do a couple of songs so I could go out and check out the sound. I heard a little distortion, no channels or amps were clipping anywhere. Upon further inspection I noticed that on all 6 15" speaker the orange foam surround was almost completely gone. I felt the foam and it was pretty brittle and would disentegrate easily.

OK, theirs the story- thanks for reading so far. My questions are
1) Do you think even if the foam was getting old they would all go at once?
2) Or would it have to be another problem like too much volume, out of phase, etc...

We setup jbls the next night without any problems. The only thing we changed was to a different crossover because one of the pots was dirty.

Old foam or something else?

Thank You, Kevin :?

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Comments

moonbaby Tue, 04/07/2009 - 10:42

UV exposure, humidity levels, etc., all affect foam speaker surrounds, and the ones made in the 70's and 80's are more adversely affected than those made with newer materials.
You should try to locate a speaker reconing/repair shop in your area. They may be able to replace the surrounds rather than a total re-coning.
My shop has been able to do that a lot. You don't want to pump the speakers before you have this done, though. If enough of the surround is crumbled, it no longer will support the cone/voicecoil assemly, and then that will cause it to rub and eventually burn out. The speakers in your cabs were manufactured by Eminence, these are readily serviceable.

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