It seems that when driven too hard, even for a short burst under normal use, they can blow out and even inflict an injury.
What’s causing these sudden blowouts, and how can you avoid them?
www.headphonesty.com
Has anyone seen this happening? Perhaps, Amir should try to replicate it and provide the conditions leading to this.
I just got a used pair of R3, and I'm starting to worry that it could happen to me.
For over 20 years I have observed an increase in various types of damage to bass and midrange/bass drivers.
This is damage to surrounds, breaks/cracks in the area where the surrounds and cones transition, or breaks/cracks in the cone close to the surrounds.
This damage is caused by permanent overloading of the chassis.
Incidentally, I have often come across coil wires that have broken off in this context, causing the chassis to fail.
This can of course happen when listening to music, but in my experience it mostly happens when the speakers are used for films on a powerful AV or stereo amplifier without a subwoofer.
Out of ignorance, the main speakers are then operated without a subsonic filter and without any other limitation, often set to BIG in the AV amplifier, even though the speakers are more SMALL.
Due to the often very deep and heavy bass and low-frequency effects, most users do not even notice that they are using their speakers far beyond the permissible range.
And just because the manufacturer specifies a maximum continuous load capacity, that does not mean that it is a good idea to operate the speaker with it permanently; 50% of that is more of a value to aim for, otherwise the speakers are simply undersized for the application.
The breaks in the KEF drivers show quite clearly that KEF uses a really extremely hard alloy, which is already very perfect. The measurements also show that they have the resonances very well under control.
I would be really interested to know how much the users had to overload the chassis of the KEF speakers for something like that to happen.
I don't think it was only 10-20%.