Just because you CAN, doesn't mean you SHOULD.

[honkytonkwillie]

Put 400+ watts of live synth through home stereo speakers, that is.

I've mentioned the compromised L65a pair a few times. Bought sight unseen, they arrived with non-JBL woofers. 12" Advent Mobile Audio dual voice coil woofers to be precise. Luckily the former owner didn't have to "make them fit", so the single 128H I've procured so far fit perfectly.

Now the 128H I had checked out by my local JBL Pro. I stood next to him as he inspected the frame, magnet, spider, surrounds, glued seams, tinsel leads, and put it through the paces with tone sweeps. He said it was a good deal for the $100 I paid for it.

Pride prevents me from listening to music through a bastardized set of speakers, so they've just been sitting idle. This afternoon I found a rare free moment when I could hide downstairs and goof off with my synthesizers. Normally I wear headphones, but I thought I'd try rigging up an old DIY passive sub to one side, and my GOOD L65 to the other side of my Mackie 1400i. Dialed in the gains to compensate for the huge sensitivity mismatch between the speakers and it worked like a champ!

And then I heard it. When playing low notes, it sounded like the woofer cone was rubbing or scraping against something. Nothing obvious on the front side, I pulled the woofer thinking the tinsel leads were sagging. Using a AA battery on the terminals, cone excursion wasn't contacting the tinsels but the scraping was still present. Moving the cone back and forth manually, it was obvious the voice coil was rubbing in the gap. Not good. Must have blistered it. Dammit!

That was a stupid thing to do. And it wasn't even loud.

[jblnut]

I run my synths through several of my systems on a regular basis. There's nothing inherently wrong with doing that as long as you mind the physical limitations of your system. Too much ultra-low bass can compromise any driver.


jblnut

[honkytonkwillie]

Trying to recreate the sound from Heart's Magic Man using two detuned square waves with slow portamento from G3 to G1. Just that by itself probably would have been safe. Adding the sub-oscillator probably killed it. I'm VERY new to synths.

[BMWCCA]

I run my synths through several of my systems on a regular basis. There's nothing inherently wrong with doing that as long as you mind the physical limitations of your system. Too much ultra-low bass can compromise any driver.

When I was a kid, I frequently played a Gibson EB0 bass through my JBL 030 system and it doesn't seem any worse for it over forty-years later.