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8+ Blown Tweets in 10 Months??? WHY?

2707 Views 61 Replies 23 Participants Last post by  Selkec
I need ideas on what might be the cause of this issue my buddy is having with his system I’ve installed and continue to upgrade as he get new equipment. 2015 Infinity Q50, originally I installed an Alpine dsp along with a active 3 way front system, 6 channel Crecendo amp, real fill and subs. First speakers to go were both Morel 2.5” dome mids that were maybe 6 months old, going within a couple days of each other. A Steg tweet, both Focal Flax tweets were toast within a month, a high end set of Pioneer tweeters lasted less than a month, and a couple months ago he finally took my advise and got the Hertz Mille Legend ML280.3 tweeter ML700.3 3” and ML1800.3 7” setup and let me move the tweeters from behind the small plastic factory grills on the doors to a-pillar pods. I had installed the same setup a couple of times in other cars and with those 3” and tweeters in the pillars and dash locations they can nearly make your ears bleed without breaking a sweat. After the first 2 or 3 sets blew, He had me add a set of 2.2k caps to the tweeters as an extra backup to the 2k setting on the amp and 2.5k setting on the DSP. I also swapped the Crecendo 6 channel out for the Audio Control 6 channel and ran dedicated wires straight from the amp to the speakers, trying to eliminate any possible causes. Last week we swapped out the Alpine DSP for a Helix 10 channel as one of the RCA jacks on the Alpine was noisy and required a ground to be soldered on to eliminate it. Anyway, he called yesterday and one of the Hertz tweeters wasn’t working, and sure enough I checked today and it’s completely dead. He doesn’t over cook his system and knows it’s limits so I don’t think it’s him and the volume knob causing it. I originally thought that because the stock grills had such small holes and not many of them that the tweeters were actually getting overworked and we just weren’t getting enough sound past the grills, and every tweet prior to today had a power rating of 25 to maybe 40 watts RMS, and the combination of the much bigger and beefier Legend tweeter in a pod right in your face with probably double the power handling had me convinced it wouldn’t happen again. I know tweeter power rating are wushy washy, but I even moved the mid/tweet crossover point to 4k when I installed the Helix DSP to compare the sound. Any ideas of what might be causing this rapidly growing graveyard of tweeters??? TIA
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Crossovers are set to low, their slope is too low, or they are being overpowered.
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can nearly make your ears bleed without breaking a sweat
If you playing them that loud you may be over powering them. How are you setting the gains? Tweeters don't need to be ran to their rated power to get loud and it's absolutely unnecessary to run them on rated power.

2.5k is also very low for a tweeter that's not designed to play that low.
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Too much power, too low HP filter or too shallow slope, Cliping
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If I were your buddy it might be time to find somebody else to set gains properly, before he burns up another set of tweeters.
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Too much power, too low HP filter or too shallow slope, Cliping
This would be my guess that this is clipping
And dirty power in combination with what is going on is killing them. Get the gains and dsp set up
Correctly before buying another set of anything
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Gains are all set properly, crossover points were all set at or above what the included crossovers had that came with the speakers or what the manufacturer recommended. I know I haven’t been working as an installer since 09, but for the 12 years I did spend doing it every day, plus the other 20 years that I have done it as a hobby and side gig, I never claimed to be or even tried to be one of the fastest guys in the bay, but there might have been one quarter that I didn’t have the lowest rate of service jobs come back, usually by a significant amount. I’ve installed well over 1000 amps, a similar number of speakers and everything else that goes with them… The gains, crossovers, settings etc were the first things that I rechecked after the first speakers died, and they have been rechecked, set, lowered…. I still to this day have to have the “gain controls are not volume or power level adjusters” conversation with people all the time. One buddy always wants his stuff set up so it’s loud, like maxed out at volume 15 out of 30 or 40. For 10 years and at least 6 big systems they have been that way. One tweeter and one old worn out 13w7 is all he has killed and he is all rap all loud all the time. If it was gains or clipping I wouldn’t be here asking for ideas.
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Before the blame game goes out of control here, how about you tell you how your setting the system up .
How do you set your gains, crossovers and slops and so on
What test cd or files are you using , are you using a scope or meter or setting of the gains. Have you checked the batteries and charging system properly?
Many unanswered questions here
Hard to answer these without knowing some of these things
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What kind of car is this. I had blown a couple of subs in my Honda due to the speed sensing volume compensation, which turns up the volume while the car is in motion. Even with the gains set properly you could still blow things due to clipping. I didn't even know it was a think until it was too late.... twice. Just a thought...
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Gains are all set properly, crossover points were all set at or above what the included crossovers had that came with the speakers or what the manufacturer recommended. I know I haven’t been working as an installer since 09, but for the 12 years I did spend doing it every day, plus the other 20 years that I have done it as a hobby and side gig, I never claimed to be or even tried to be one of the fastest guys in the bay, but there might have been one quarter that I didn’t have the lowest rate of service jobs come back, usually by a significant amount. I’ve installed well over 1000 amps, a similar number of speakers and everything else that goes with them… The gains, crossovers, settings etc were the first things that I rechecked after the first speakers died, and they have been rechecked, set, lowered…. I still to this day have to have the “gain controls are not volume or power level adjusters” conversation with people all the time. One buddy always wants his stuff set up so it’s loud, like maxed out at volume 15 out of 30 or 40. For 10 years and at least 6 big systems they have been that way. One tweeter and one old worn out 13w7 is all he has killed and he is all rap all loud all the time. If it was gains or clipping I wouldn’t be here asking for ideas.
If you have checked gains and settings and all in fact are correct for the system, I assume you have to start looking at some equipment issue. May also want to list how the specifics on how you are setting up the system. It could also be a user issue. Back and the day, I knew guys that constantly blew stuff up because they never backed off the volume knob even if you could hear things screaming not in a good way
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What kind of car is this. I had blown a couple of subs in my Honda due to the speed sensing volume compensation, which turns up the volume while the car is in motion. Even with the gains set properly you could still blow things due to clipping. I didn't even know it was a think until it was too late.... twice. Just a thought...
This will take out midbass drivers like nothing.
Especially if you accelerated from like 75 to 95.
This could be anything. But most likely improperly setting of the gain structure.
Something as simple as applied eq boost after level matching the amplifier. 3 db will do it with a tweeter on high power amp like either of two you mentioned.
Ok I sorta knew that it may go this direction but I’ll list all the other stuff and explain how I set it up.

the owner of the car had previously installed one of those giant screens/android based tablet head unit systems that are becoming more common for newer cars, as his stock dash had two smaller displays, and now he has a giant Tesla type. It’s basically a vehicle specific plug and play that works with the stock amplified 15 or 17 speaker system. Unfortunately no rca outs for any aftermarket add one. Sub amp is a DS18 KO3 3k running either a single ported Ampere Audio Neo 12”, a ported B2 Rampage 12”, 3 B2 Audio Rampage 8”’s ported or his new as of last week Rockford T2 13” I’ve made both a sealed and ported box for. I’ve made all the other boxes as well. He likes to try different subs. And he was doing it with the front speakers to which is why I was pushing him to try the Hertz plus letting me move the tweeters and 3” from the stock door locations to the a-pillar and dash. Electrical is all upgraded. I installed a 260 amp alt, all good 0 guage power grounds with an XS battery under the hood and a XS lithium battery in the trunk. I installed the module for the alternator so it charges all the time and has the voltage control which is typically set at 14.6-14.8, and rarely dips below 14.
I specifically set the tweeter/midrange crossover points slightly higher than what the specific crossovers that came with the speaker set used, or if they were bought as drivers only like the Hertz I set them slightly higher than what the manufacturer recommended. This was set in the DSP. I also set the HP on the amp as a “backup” in case the dsp settings crashed or got changed somehow, and set them about 200hz below the dsp setting. After a couple dead speakers he had me throw in a set of caps on the tweeter leads, which I think are 2.2k at 4 ohm, possibly 2.8k, but by that time I had already gone up close to 3k on the base crossover point also. All are 24db linkwitz. I originally set the amp gains the same way I’ve done it more than 1000 times. One at a time, volume 3 to 4 notches below max, starting at minimum go up to any sign it’s close to clip/distortion, then I back off quite a bit. I always run gains low, like normally it’s hard to find any track that can’t be played all day at max the volume setting. I do know that the owner likes to tinker with settings and stuff but I always check and have never found anything that could be an obvious cause that had been changed. I have checked them with a scope, albeit a cheap one, but never saw any flat spots. I do know that he can play music from the head unit or via Bluetooth from his phone to the head unit or the dsp and he has now also picked up a portable hi-res player that will be hard wired to the Helix and will be what he regularly uses. I thought maybe the different input options could have something to do with it ?? The one area that I don’t have much experience is tuning the more complex dsp systems with multiple input sources as the very first versions were just being released when I quit working with 12 volts to work with 26,000 volts, so while I understand what the different setting and features are, I’m a total noob at being efficient at the setup and tuning portions. Around the same time that I installed the caps on the tweeters we also swapped the Crescendo 6 channel for the current non DSP Audio Control 6 channel, which I believe is rated at 120x6 at 4 ohms. Then last week I pulled the Alpine DSP out and installed the Helix DSP Pro MK2 and Director, which has had us learning a new software system and setup. The current Hertz speakers have been installed for a little over 2 months, and I did the direct amp to tweeter wire at that time, and those tweeters have always been set above 3.5k. Just today I eliminated the stock front tweeter signals that had been used as the source signal for the high frequencies when I originally installed the Alpine a few years ago and now have all the mids and tweets using the rear door speaker output signal from the stock amp. I have both the rear doors and stock sub signals summed as the subwoofer input. I thought that maybe there was some issue with how the dsp’s were connected to the cars system as that’s the one thing I’m not well versed in….
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regardless of how well you think you installed these tweeters, and set the gains and crossovers, they are blowing for 1 reason, too much heat on the voice coil. Raise the XO point, increase the slope, and turn the gain down.
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have you checked the signal with a scope from all available source inputs?
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completely flat settings, crossover at 4.5k 12db slope, -3db attenuation, wear hearing aids.

Add sound treatment and deadening to the WHOLE CAR.
I had one of those android jobs and it made the "ding" from my text messages on my phone, coming through the speakers, so harsh, loud and high pitched that it took out 4 sets of tweets before i figured out what was causing it.
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regardless of how well you think you installed these tweeters, and set the gains and crossovers, they are blowing for 1 reason, too much heat on the voice coil. Raise the XO point, increase the slope, and turn the gain down.
especially since they're running capacitors.
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One at a time, volume 3 to 4 notches below max, starting at minimum go up to any sign it’s close to clip/distortion, then I back off quite a bit. I always run gains low, like normally it’s hard to find any track that can’t be played all day at max the volume setting.
The crescendo is rated 100-200w @4ohm depending on the amp channel used (dirty korean power). Those things put out more than rated power. Then you set gains just below clipping. Tweeters don't need that much power. The Hertz is rated 90RMS, the others probly way less. Audio control 125w and if you set gains the same way... you over powered them.
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The crescendo is rated 100-200w @4ohm depending on the amp channel used (dirty korean power). Those things put out more than rated power. Then you set gains just below clipping. Tweeters don't need that much power. The Hertz is rated 90RMS, the others probly way less. Audio control 125w and if you set gains the same way... you over powered them.
Imagine how much treble energy would be blasting (compared to remaining freq spectrum) before they blew if your scenario was correct.
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