Loudspeaker warranties and black market products

A few years back I read a study where it found the average life of a consumer electronics product like TV or audio is approximately 4.5 years if the product makes it past the 30 day mark.  Most failures due to workmanship of materials happen before that 30 day mark.  

When I buy something new I put some serious hours on it in that 30 day window intentionally.   I can't remember the last time I had a failure.   I've been extremely lucky at this game over the past 45 years 

So yes. I appreciate warranties , but they are seldom needed early in a products life.   

My main speakers were a 10 year warranty , second system speaker has a five year warranty.   DAC, 5 years.    Second system amp, 3 years.   Sub, 5 years.   All good warranties, still in effect but I hope to never exercise them.  

@mulveling is correct, speaker warranties are of little import. His advice to stash drivers is sound, however drivers by and large don’t fail unless abused.

That leaves the crossovers. Unless you rock Thiel CS5i, crossovers are simple circuits that are easily fixed / refurbished. 

My speakers are 42 years old. I play them loud. I like loud impolite music. I have no spare drivers around. I rebuilt (and modestly improved) my crossovers in my spare time. Will I experience a massive driver blowout tomorrow? Maybe, but I’ll cross that bridge if and when I get to it.

I once said that any audiophile worth his salt should learn how to fix their own gear. I was roundly flamed for that, but let me say this: if you are in fact going to fix your own gear, your speaker crossovers are the best place to start.

If you are concerned about speaker longevity, the two things to look out for if you want more than ten years of service are: 1) the type of surround for the woofer--foam rubber surrounds tend to crumble after a certain number of years, particularly if they are exposed to strong light (drivers can be re-foamed by services that are out there that specialize in this service); and 2) presence of ferromagnetic fluid in the voice gap of tweeters that tend to get gummy and dry out (there are also services that clean out and replace such fluid).  

Speakers are quite durable when not abused by excessively high volume play or being used as scratching posts by cats, etc.  It is also remarkable how many older speakers sound really good even though they don't have the supposed benefit of modern materials and technical improvements.

A leading cause of speaker trauma is inadequate amplification. Most speakers love current and don't get well with amps that can't provide it.

A leading cause of speaker trauma is inadequate amplification. Most speakers love current and don’t get well with amps that can’t provide it.

Yep, that is a comon cause of trauma to tweeters - when you over-drive with an under-powered amp.

Why? Because normal musical content is comprised of roughly "equal energy per octave", which means when you have a tweeter crossed over at say 2K - 4KHz, it only "sees" a fraction of the overall signal energy. Perhaps around 10 - 20% at most. Tweeters are made to be nimble & lightweight so they can extend into higher frequencies with lower distortion, and this goes hand-in-hand with lower power handling - so the tweeters in most speakers have an actual power handling that is much lower than the speaker’s rated overall power handling - which works OK as long as you feed the speakers a normal music signal. But when you overdrive an amp into hard clipping, those sharp / squared tops are not like normal musical signal. They contain transient energy at very high frequencies (above tweeter crossover) and at a level up to 2x the amp’s maximum continuous power (because a square wave is not a sine wave; it has 2x the area under its "curve"). So basically, the tweeter gets "shocked" with the amp’s full power (and then some), which it was definitely not designed to do. This is why "too little power" gets a reputation for killing tweeters. But at the end of the day, it’s power that kills tweeters, so you could equally kill them by using a kilo-Watt amp at WAY too loud of a volume! It would be an SPL level that runs most people out of the room (if not house), but then some of us are built different :)

And some tweeters are just tougher than others. Compression drivers (like Tannoy "pepperpots") tend to be pretty damn tough, because they have much larger voice coils (2" or so), which can better absorb and disspate heat. 

The ferrofluid in some tweeters (like Tannoy "tulip" waveguides) is meant to absorb the heat energy away from the coils, but it can dry out from too much. And also over time. But this is usually quite serviceable -  clean out the old fluid and add a little new fluid of the right viscosity.

Surrounds should also generally have the ability to be repaired / replaced. Some types are tougher than others. Treated fabric / textile surouns can be VERY tough and long lived. They even stand up really well to cat claws (don’t ask lol). That’s my favorite (again, found on Tannoys). But the driver needs to be designed around that. 

The hardest to fix issues are going to be blown or bashed-up voice coils, and fractured metal cones or domes.