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| Car subwoofer blown |
An car subwoofer contains an voice coil, this is the part that creates the speaker along with the spider and magnet. The voice coil itself contains several strands of wire wrapped around and determines the power handling of the car subwoofer. If you keep blowing up car subwoofers, it can get costly and most likely when this happens it is an installation error. We get customers coming to our car audio shop all time purchasing brand new car subwoofers expecting them to last. We always advise that you get your car audio settings on your car amplifier and car head unit setup up by an professional for the best sound and longevity.
The biggest cause that is responsible for blowing up a car subwoofer is distortion and clipping. These two things are similar in nature, but can easily cause the voice coil to heat up really quickly and burn out even at low volumes. The best way to tune your car subwoofer to prevent it blowing up is find the distortion point on your car headunit first and ensure all equaliser settings are flat. On most car radios it is around 70% of the maximum volume your headunit allows. Once you have found the distortion point on your car stereo, you simply turn up the gain on the car amplifier and stop until you hear the subwoofer no longer play clean deep bass. As soon as you hear distortion, you will notice the sound quality drop, it sounds like an farting or vibration noise and it increases the more you turn up the gain. Many mistaken the gain for an volume knob and we see it all the time. The user has turned it up to the maximum setting, thinking there subwoofer is going to sound louder than there friends.
An subsonic filter should be switched on if you have an ported box. An subsonic feature is added onto an car amplifier to prevent the subwoofer bottoming out. When this happens at high volumes, the subwoofer will loose control of itself and can damage the soft mechanical parts. This is because the subwoofer will attempt to play bass frequencies that are too low for it to handle, this is down to the box tuning. You will need to determine the tuning frequency of the port your subwoofer enclosure is tuned too. Set the subsonic filter to about 2 HZ below it so the subwoofer can play efficiently without breaking anything. An subsonic filter on an sealed box is not required as this type of enclosure design can play flat all the way from 80 HZ to 20 Hz.
Over powering your car subwoofer. You should always ensure the rms rating of your car subwoofer matches the rms output of your car amplifier. For example, if you're sending 1000 rms to an 500 rms subwoofer and the gains are turned up, during long periods of loud listening levels the voice coil will eventually blow out. Always match the rms output of car audio equipment, if your car amplifier is way too powerful for your car subwoofer, then turn down the gain really low just to be extra careful. The benefits you get when using an car amplifier that is more powerful than the subwoofer is less distortion, but you need to be careful with the gain. When you notice an plastic smell when listening to your car subwoofer loud, this is an common sign to tell you to turn it down. This is the voice coil melting inside the subwoofer and the glue is giving off an smell.
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