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Is my subwoofer blown?
I've had a Diamond D3 12" subwoofer for a year. I had never had a big amp before today; I've always had 500 watts and below. I had never really pushed my sub before. Today I bought a new amp for my sub. It is a Rockford Fosgate 2 channel 850 watt amp. It replaced my 500 watt Alpine amp. I was playing around with the gain to try to get the sub to sound good, but I accidentally let the sub play on too high of a setting for too long. The sub started distort, and it kept getting worse, and before I could turn the gain back down (this all happened within a period of about 10 seconds) the sub stopped working. I thought it had just clipped so I expected it to come back on in a few seconds but it never did. I let it rest for an hour and came back to it to see if it had just overheated or something, but it still didn't work.
TL;DR - The gain was set too high on my new amp and my subwoofer stopped working.
I'm afraid that I may have blown it. I feel sick to my stomach because if I did blow it, then that's $160 down the drain :C
OK, so I checked it with a multimeter. It's supposed to be a 4-ohm sub (that's what was advertised when I bought it; that's what the bottom of the sub says). The reading I was getting on the multimeter was jumping around 1.8-1.9, then it would sporadically jump to 4-point-something and everywhere between. I'm a little concerned.
Also, the amp is capable of delivering 1050 watts at 4-ohms on a bridged connection (which is what I'm using).
Plus, a D3 is capable of handling 800 Watts. http://www.diamondaudio.com/content/view/134/148/
UPDATE:
I took the sub inside my house and hooked it up to my home theater, and it still works (thank god). I just can't understand why it won't work in my car anymore...
There is a tiny bit of crackling, though. I'm not sure if that was my theater cabinet or the sub, but it sounded like it was coming from the sub.
SOLVED!
Blown fuse!!!
4 Answers
- Anonymous1 decade agoFavorite Answer
Typically a "blown" speaker will smell horrible... like burning electronics. This is the resin in the voice coil. Even if it is blown it will still make some kind of crackling noise or something though... they are not usually silent. More likely is that your new amplifier detected the sub becoming overstressed and put itself into protection mode. Try hooking your sub up to your home stereo for a brief moment to see if any sound comes out. Or try hooking your old amp back up real quick to see if it works.
- Alonzo ULv 51 decade ago
From what you have said, it sounds like you burnt the voice coils up. A sure way to check this is to grab a digital multimeter set it to the lowest setting you have for resistance. Touch one lead of the DMM to the positive of one of the voice coils and the other lead to the negative. If you get no reading at all, then the voice coil is no longer connected.
I don't know how you had the coils hooked up so I don't know the final impedance of your setup, but an amp that puts out 850 watts RMS could easily have blown your sub... Diamond D3 D312's can only handle 400 watts RMS. The Alpine amp was most definitely the limit on how high-power you could go... heck even the alpine could have blown that sub if you didn't know what you were doing.
Sorry bout the bad news, make sure your sub can handle that much power before hooking it up next time, a 5 minute google search for "Diamond D3 12" would have revealed t could only handle 400 watts RMS.
EDIT: Jim B brings up a good point, since its a 2-channel amp you may be running the amp at too low of a load, the amp could be in protect mode because of that causing complete silence. (The amp can't detect if the sub is being over stressed... it will blow the sub without a snag if you send too much power to it... but the amp may be being pushed beyond its capabilities by running at a lower impedance than designed for.)
- 1 decade ago
sounds like you did:( but before u get down shut ur car off take all the wires off the sub and reconnect them and see if it works if it dont then ur out of luck...this happened to me and it worked by reconnecting the wires..
Source(s): personal experience - Anonymous1 decade ago
Yeah you need a new sub from what i heard you said.
