I've also fried a few speakers in my day..
The most memorable ones were tiny speakers that didn't actually cook -after eating 200W for about 10 minutes!
I was testing an amp I had just repaired,and had a couple of cheap little "PC-speaker" sized guys (maybe 2.5inches across?) sitting on the bench,so I hooked them up for the preliminary 'smoke test'.
Everything seemed fine,so I cranked the volume up a bit..Things started sounding bad,and smelling pretty funky,but those little suckers WOULD NOT die! They got ungodly hot,and I had to stop the test as they were starting to melt into the cushion on the seat they were sitting on.
I left them to cool,and about a week later hooked them up again,they worked/sounded about as well as a little PC-speaker would.
I still don't know how they survived it,but they did. The amp didn't even break a sweat.
The most memorable ones were tiny speakers that didn't actually cook -after eating 200W for about 10 minutes!
I was testing an amp I had just repaired,and had a couple of cheap little "PC-speaker" sized guys (maybe 2.5inches across?) sitting on the bench,so I hooked them up for the preliminary 'smoke test'.
Everything seemed fine,so I cranked the volume up a bit..Things started sounding bad,and smelling pretty funky,but those little suckers WOULD NOT die! They got ungodly hot,and I had to stop the test as they were starting to melt into the cushion on the seat they were sitting on.
I left them to cool,and about a week later hooked them up again,they worked/sounded about as well as a little PC-speaker would.
I still don't know how they survived it,but they did. The amp didn't even break a sweat.
As a high school kid was also amazed at how hard it was to kill a little "1 watt" radio speaker with a "50 watt" guitar amp. After a while, we tired of trying to blow it up open air, and put it in a pot of water and continued playing. The speaker made some gurgling noise for a while, then finally gave up the ghost.
When voice coils get hot, the impedance rises, "thermal compression". Your little speaker's impedance probably rose to the point where the amp was only delivering a fraction of the power it would in to a cold speaker, maintaining an equilibrium, the hotter it gets, the less power delivered.
In our experiment, the water cooled the voice coil so the amp could deliver it's rated power in to the 8 ohm (nominal) speaker which then burnt like a slow-blow fuse.
Thanks for the memories!
Strangely enough, not that much.
It's strange because I got/have a whole lot of 'recycled' electronic parts, but not speakers.
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