B&W 683 damage

[goldsbrough]

Hi guys / gals,
I could just do with a bit of advice here. I bought some B&W 683s about a year ago and gave them a good look over.. i then left the covers on until today, but when i took them off i noticed on the left mid, some of the kevlar looks badly woven at the edges!? could it be that it's escaping the glue at the sides in places?
So i looked at the right mid.. same. I then had a good look at the tweaters - one is creased. One of the Al mushroom drivers is slightly dented..
Pictures are posted at
http://www.manchestersound.com/bw/mid1.jpg
http://www.manchestersound.com/bw/mid2.jpg
http://www.manchestersound.com/bw/tweat1.jpg
http://www.manchestersound.com/bw/tweat2.jpg
http://www.manchestersound.com/bw/mush.jpg

So my question is: Did this happen by playing them too loud?
It's not the usual voice coil welding together, spiders deforming, cone ripping i would expect to see, but my experience is with pa speakers when it comes to distruction, and these are more complicated. If it was just the tweater and the bass cone that were damaged i might suspect a pokey finger at some party, but with the mids looking worse for wear too, I wonder whether it's the volume? Or something else? It is possible they were damaged in transit somehow and i didn't notice when i got them, but it seems unlikely.
They're powered by a NAD C370, never turned over half way. Obviously I have to accept that this has happened, but i would like to prevent further damage if possible. I don't think i play them particularly loud, but i'm not really sure what to compare it to (no spl meter here).

They still sound awesome .....!

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

G

 

[Phlog]

Some one else posted some weeks ago about their Kevlar units - they were discolouring to green.

In the case of you speaker, if the Kevlar unit was carrying bass requencies I could understand the possibility of that damage, but it's a mid-range speaker. I suppose you've checked that the cross-over isn't letting bass frequenciees through? If it is, that's probably a manufacturing fault anyway.

I can't see how simply using the speakers would cause the tweeter fold - it looks very odd. I wonder if an original manufacturing fault has appeared?

My comment to the other poster was that B&W had moved manfacturing to China, so possibly the faults on your speakers are due to "teething problems".

When moving speakers it is best to short the inputs. But that's really to protect the bass units.

The speakers themselves are rated as coping with amplifiers up to 200 watts. Usually damage is most likely to be caused by a low rated amplifiers being driven into clipping. And I'd say that even in that case you are more likely to cause electrical damage rather than damage to the cones, etc.

I would contact both your dealer and B&W.

For the earlier posting see: www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=721147

Do note the last posting by the OP.