Today I messed around with some of my system’s ground cables and, when I went to play the first tune of the afternoon, as I upped the volume to a normal listening level, it sounded like the tweeter in the right speaker was blown.
Okay, so panic immediately sets in even though I didn’t do anything crazy the night before. I decide to swap interconnects to see if the noise moves to the other speaker suggesting that it’s not the speaker, but something upstream. Noise goes away. WTF?? Swap back the interconnects and there’s the noise again.
What I really want to discuss here is my immediate catastrophic mental and physical reaction to the problem. At this point, I am pretty much having a coronary. It’s a Sunday and I’ve blown my tweeter and my dealer’s closed until Tuesday and, even then, how soon could a replacement become available and be installed? Or else it’s some failure upstream, but whatever it is, it’s really bad, and I’m going to be without my beloved system for some period of time. My music is my rock. It helps keep me semi-sane in these trying times. I don’t have backups for any of these components. How will I survive this disaster??
This is not the first time I’ve had an issue and thought the worst, while feeling my blood pressure spike.
Text audio buddy Marc. “I’ve blown my tweeter!” He comes back with, “It must be a bad connection somewhere.”
I didn’t mess with anything but the ground cables since my listening session the night before, so what could be different? Well, those fancy WBT Nextgen binding posts on my amps and speakers have a minimal contact area, and they can lose connection just by looking at them funny. Sure enough the spade connection to one of the tweeter posts was a tad askew and, when asked to supply current to the tweeter, it could not, generating the static sound I interpreted as a blown tweeter. Almost every prior problem I had with my system could be traced back to a problem with these binding posts, yet I leapt to a dire conclusion before truly thoroughly investigating and trouble shooting what might actually be amiss.
If I still had a shrink, my tendency to so quickly go into catastrophic thinking mode over a problem with my system would be a fertile topic for discussion. Still, my takeaway is the giant role my system and my music is in this old man’s life, as revealed by my crazy reaction to its possible temporary absence. I’ll try to learn from it…
