Blown out speaker

punkslayer · Dec 15, 2008

I have a 2006 330i with Logic7. One of my speakers are blown out as far as I can tell, and was wondering whether I should get it replaced by the dealer, or if its a better idea to just go to circuit city and get some aftermarket speakers installed. My main priority is bass. If I go with the after market speakers, will it conflict with having harmon kardons everywhere except for the rear 2 speakers. (I think its the one on the drivers side rear door).

Thanks in advance

punkslayer · Dec 15, 2008

Also, is it possible that it might still be under warranty?

Thanks

jwac · Dec 15, 2008

First off, almost all the speaker sizes are non-standard so I think it's very difficult to replace them with aftermarket units unless you go with an outfit like BSW (not sure if even they have an E9x upgrade yet). Second, if you have less than 50k miles on your car then a blown speaker should certainly be covered under warranty.

kristine's 335i · Dec 15, 2008

BSW does have them available for the E90/91 just not the coupes and verts yet, from what I understand. If you are over the 50K mark, check them out, they are totally plug and play speakers with complete instructions to do the DIY.

Boraxo · Mar 14, 2009

My front speaker blew out on my 330i so I brought it to the dealer yesterday. He reports back that BMW asked them to do a software upgrade and see if it fixed the problem. What a joke (he admitted that everybody could tell it was blown). Thankfully we are still under warranty so I guess I'll get a new speaker.

Any guesses how long that one will last? Should I ask for an upgrade?

bsell · Mar 14, 2009

I wonder at what point BMW or the dealership would cry 'vehicle abuse' over blown speakers?

There is sufficient excess volume control to 'blow' speakers in almost any audio system. If the 'excess' volume range was not there, the system could be rightly accused of not having enough gain to provide the desired loudness with quiet source material.

As the volume knob goes to '11', it should be physically possible to 'over drive' the speakers and hurt them.

One could argue that more stout speakers would prevent this, but you can 'burn' any tweeters by clipping the amps hard and long (that's what she said

), and melt the voice coil in the tweeters. You could also argue that the bass speakers should handle whatever can be thrown at them by the components upstream. But with folks 'making' their own music via saved equalizer settings, think severely boosted bass with the BMW's bass on '10,' and you can quickly exceed OEM woofers' mechanical capacity.

Am I off target here?

Brian

Pat_X5 · Mar 14, 2009

The problem is not the amp, but more importantly the source. Amplifiers have a certain amount of headroom (that's what she said) but the source if it is not clean in amplitude, but rather distorts the amp distorts that after reaching headroom, that's what causes speakers to blow. A clean amp with a clean signal can over pump the speakers and never break them. Remember your class A amplifiers back in the day ? These days clean amps never are that clean and the source music (MP3 or compressed audio) might be a bad mix.

Boraxo · Mar 16, 2009

Actually, the problem is cheap-*** hardware. I had the same problem in my Explorer. Very rarely do I crank the music up, nor do I use MP3 input (except iPod - rarely). Apparently BMW and other companies just don't care about OEM speaker quality (or more likely would prefer that you pay big $$$ to upgrade the system).

Blown out speaker

punkslayer

punkslayer

jwac

kristine's 335i

Boraxo

bsell

Pat_X5

Boraxo

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