pioneer speakers (blown??)

hey all. I have a pair of Pioneer s-h153b-k speakers, which are a two way bookshelf style speaker with a 6.5 inch ported woofer and a 1 inch silk tweeter. I have them hooked up to a realistic ax6 reciever bi-wired with a pair of floor speakers. At any rate, i really like these speakers. They were reasonably priced and sound really good, however for the past few weeks i've been hearing a buzzing coming out of one of them (at times i think the other might be doing it as well.) It generally only happens when i'm playing them pretty loud, but it's getting really annoying. I took the speakers out and examined the spider and such (I've seen spiders tear and create similar obnoxious noises.) But it all looked fine. Did i smoke the voice coil? what happened? Is the problem easily remedied? I'm assuming not, but if anyone has any ideas fire away. I'm assuming they're shot. They still sound good at low and medium levels, and if i run them biwired with the floor speakers i send most of the bass to the floor speakers which also seems to help. Anyway, thanks in advance!!

[Darren]

If you bi-wired them in parallel you cut the impedance in half which doubles the power output of most amps if they can handle the load. Sounds like they may be shot... fried voice coils or maybe spider damage. Most likely from driving them too hard or from amp clipping.

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

if i run them biwired with the floor speakers i send most of the bass to the floor speakers which also seems to help.

Exactly how did you “send” the bass to the larger speakers specifically? Unless you had a passive or electronic crossover, the small ones have been getting a full range signal, just like the big speakers. That could be what happened to them.

The first thing to do is to figure out exactly what the problem is. Speakers are pretty simple – a tweeter, woofer and crossover. If the problem is one of the speakers, you should be able to tell which one by putting your ear close to each driver in turn while you’re getting the noise from it. It shouldn’t be hard to figure out which one, if indeed it is one of the drivers.

Typically, a damaged driver will sound bad at any volume, especially at low levels. That tells me it might be something that’s loose inside – like maybe a screw securing the crossover, for instance. Since you’re not averse to taking things apart, you can always take a look inside and see what you find.

Regards,
Wayne

when i said i have the speakers bi-wired i meant that they have two seperate channels basically. My reciever allows for two sets of front speakers (an A and a B) You can run one set if you'd like, you can run both sets if you'd like, or you can run them "bi-wired" which allows you to send different amounts of bass to whichever set of speakers you'd like. So I send the majority of the bass to my floor speakers since they have 12 inch woofers and need all they can get. It's actually a really sweet setup, and is one of the main reasons i purchased this particular reciever. (It also has a pretty powerful built in subwoofer amp, however i run a cerwin vega 12" sub anyway.) But for the record I am in no way running them in parallel and in turn messing with the impedence.

At any rate, i'll take them apart and take another gander. As i said before, they still sound clear at low and even medium volumes. It's not until you get on them that they start to make the buzzing, and only in certain "bassy" situations.

Thanks again.