According to Bowe, one of the most extraordinary things about passive speakers is that they can last a lifetime! Unlike many modern active speakers, the passive ones have no inbuilt technological confines. Neither a new wireless protocol nor a software update will influence their functioning and make them irreversibly outdated. If you buy new passive loudspeakers today, you will use them the same way in 30 years.
Table 1 below displays some primary advantages and disadvantages of both types of speakers. In theory, active speakers have prevailing advantages regarding the compatibility with the new technologies. The capability to accept wireless signals seems to be a crucial advantage. However, it is not the same when talking about durability. In most cases, the fast development of the same technologies that seem to give an advantage to active speakers makes them outdated and unable to use.
There are no repair or upgrading options, so you have to buy new active speakers, which is relatively unprofitable. The key to making your speakers last a lifetime is in the correct and regular maintenance. In the case of the speakers, the maintenance does not strictly refer to upgrade or any standard repairs.
It is instead a matter of routine care and protection. The top five enemies of the speakers are dust, heat, static electricity, power surges, and pure ventilation. If you can protect your speakers from these enemies, you will enjoy listening to them for a lifetime. Like most of the stuff that people use, speakers also wear out. However, the period of wearing out, especially for passive speakers, is quite long. The time, of course, depends on both intensities of use and the proper maintenance of the loudspeakers.
Typically, speaker parts such as the surround, cone, and capacitor of the crossover deteriorate over time, lowering the sound quality.
Besides the top five enemies mentioned above, there are bunches of other common reasons that can make your speakers sound bad. The first other possibility is turning them too loud for an extended period. Having said that, I must admit, I often carry out tests on the system, and in my lab using an analog audio voltmeter that is— now, let me see—more than 40 years old! Indeed, if I look at some of the test equipment in my lab, I can see that a few items must be several decades old.
I thought I would donate them to a local charity to sell in its shop to raise some funds. I pulled them out of their original packaging and connected them up to the lab audio amplifier and DAB tuner. They were a bit quiet, but they still worked. Upon removing the front grilles, however, I was a little surprised to find that the foam cone sur rounds were no longer there. They had completely perished. Materials have improved considerably since then, as, indeed, has our understanding of them!
By far, though, the winner is a loudspeaker from that I ran into at the start of this year. It sounded pretty much as the plot shown in Figure 2 would suggest. The unit is a dipole, with as much sound radiating from the rear as from the front. Indeed, both subjectively and objectively, more HF was being radiated from the rear of the speaker than from the front.
This is shown in Figure 3. I found it ironic that this unit, created in , worked perfectly out of the box. They just shouldn't sound that good, but they do. Sure not complaining. Think it's bad caps or something. The speakers have never been used. Cabs are mint.
In the closet for later repairs. Rare speakers are a pain in the butt for used parts. Location: Tigard, Oregon. On some speakers, it may help to tighten the driver screws every few years or so.
Location: detroit, mi. Location: tokyo. The part with shortest life is condenser in network. The longest is They were in daily use in a theatre for 31 years before I got them. MLutthans , Feb 11, Location: silly, location.
Location: Hollywood, USA. I bet everybody who thinks their ancient speakers sounds OK hasn't tested them. You start detecting some surprising things when you do a response sweep or a pink noise test through them and start measuring them. Trying to go by a memory of what they sounded like 20 years ago is vague at best; I can barely remember what I had for lunch last week, let alone what a speaker sounded like years ago.
I did that once in a brand-new transfer room that sounded "funny" to me, and we discovered that the treble boost switches were on one speaker, and turned all the way down on the other speaker. The only way we figured this out was by measuring test tones. Once we saw that a 10kHz tone was down about 10dB, we thought, "uh-oh. How long depends on their specific design and construction. Vidiot , Feb 11, Location: Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.
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