Please Help me (Question)

[captiankirk28]

Ok i have been trying to get my system running smooth for a long time now. I have had some problems with blowing up tweeters oy new MTS-01 so i thought i was clipping my AVR (Pioneer Elite VSX94THX) but than SVS had the crossover upgrade that has better tweeter protection so i thought that that was just the problem, so problem fixed right-- Wroung i blew another tweeter and i was not even listing that loud, so i decided to get a better amp so i got a motiva XPA-3 to run my fronts, so i was listing to some music and my brand new amp sparked and smoke came out the top, so that leads me to belive that it was my AVR the whole time but what would cause that? My reciver is not even 1 year old yet i dont think, it has a 2 year Elite warranty. But i will prob have to send it away and be without aything for who knows how long.

 

[shenaniganz]

Sorry no helpfull info,
but I would grab a priest cuz i think your reciever is possessed by the devil..

 

[rnatalli]

Sorry no helpfull info,
but I would grab a priest cuz i think your reciever is possessed by the devil..

Now that's funny!

OP, as you know the MTS have had some issues with their tweeters. Try hooking up some other speakers to see what happens. If they go, then you know it's the AVR. If they don't, something is up with your speakers.

 

[captiankirk28]

Yes that is what i was thinking.

But i dont know how it could send such a signal through the speaker post that would do that, but ther is alot i dont know. All i do know is that that is what it did.

 

[captiankirk28]

Now that's funny!

OP, as you know the MTS have had some issues with their tweeters. Try hooking up some other speakers to see what happens. If they go, then you know it's the AVR. If they don't, something is up with your speakers.

I had my Pioneer HPM-100s hooked up at the time of the smoke out.

 

[TLS Guy]

I had my Pioneer HPM-100s hooked up at the time of the smoke out.

I don't see how a receiver's pre outs could possibly send a signal to an amp, that would blow it up. I highly doubt your receiver blew your amp. There is only low voltage gain at the pre outs no power amplification.

I do trust you did not have your receiver and power amp both connected to the speakers at the same time.

I think those speakers blew your amp, that is much more likely. It sounds as if those speakers were designed by a rookie who needs more schooling in the art of speaker design.

I have been on the Tymphany/Scanspeak site, and looked at that tweeter. It is based on the D 29, which is one of my favorite tweeters, and I have never blown one. This speakers have an Fs of 500 Hz, and can handle over 18 watts continuous power, which is a lot for a tweeter.

If they were/are blowing those tweeters, somebody needs to go back to school at SVS, and take crossover design 101.

 

[captiankirk28]

I dont know wt part of my system to trust now, but if the speakers were capable of doing that to my amp would it not do the same thing to my AVR. SVS said that i am the only one who has had any problems with them after the crossover change.With people using all different kinds of AVRs.

 

[TLS Guy]

I dont know wt part of my system to trust now, but if the speakers were capable of doing that to my amp would it not do the same thing to my AVR. SVS said that i am the only one who has had any problems with them after the crossover change.With people using all different kinds of AVRs.

This problem is impossible to sort out long range, unless you have a battery of test equipment and know how to use it.

I'm suspicious of SVS. Your speakers are rated at 8 ohms, but those tweeters are four ohm. Now it is possible the impedance is made up in the L-pad, but the whole thing is odd.

Who changed the crossovers? Is this something you did?

What is the story on the Emotiva amp? Have Emotiva looked at it? That would probably give a clue as to the suitability of the amp to drive those speakers, and if the speakers likely had a hand in the failure.

As to why the receiver did not blow, may be it had better current limiting to protect the output. If the speakers were causing the receiver to use excessive current limiting that could contribute to tweeter failure.

My hunch is that it is the speakers. I think you posted a while ago driving your gear so loud you were driving, I think a Yamaha receiver, into protection. Is that correct?

Now those SVS speakers have low sensitivity and if you try an push them you are asking for trouble. They don't look like a high spl speaker to me. The specs and information on the SVS site and manual, are criminally sparse by the way. Not an outfit I would be dealing with on what I see. I have never been on their site to any extent before, and I'm unimpressed.

So I'm sorry, I can't do much as to give an educated guess, and a possible plausible explanation for your scenario.

If your problems persists, you will need expert professional help from someone with a good array of test equipment. I think we have have gone as far as we can with problems as serious as these at long range.

 

[captiankirk28]

Thank you for your help. Answer your question on whohanged the crossovers SVS did that. Emotiva has not looked at the amp yet because this just happned this morn. They are sending me out a new one tomorrow and then mine will go back at the same time.

I wonder if SVS will give me back my money so i can get some speakers that will work right if that of corse is the problem. I am going to call them tomorrow and have a chat with them.

 

[TLS Guy]

Thank you for your help. Answer your question on whohanged the crossovers SVS did that. Emotiva has not looked at the amp yet because this just happned this morn. They are sending me out a new one tomorrow and then mine will go back at the same time.

I wonder if SVS will give me back my money so i can get some speakers that will work right if that of corse is the problem. I am going to call them tomorrow and have a chat with them.

I would not hook up the replacement until those speakers are carefully checked out. You can't expect Emotiva to keep taking the hit. You have been blowing tweeters, so may be the voice coils of the woofers are damaged as well. Over driven woofers often melt the insulation on the voice coil wiring, shorting turns together. This drops the speaker impedance to dangerously low levels. The more I think about this, I think this is a strong possibility. Those speakers need carefully checking out before being used any further, and damaging more equipment.

I do think you need to look to at the volume you are playing your equipment. This is domestic equipment not pro gear.

Was it you who posted about recording an insane spl. and driving a receiver into protection? I think it was. If so be careful, otherwise you will get through a lot of gear, as well as go deaf.

 

[captiankirk28]

Yes i was not planing on hooking it up untill i figure out what the problem is.
It was me that did that with my old AVR and i was just experimenting with my new equipment but since then i have not played them that loud again.

I know i dont have pro gear but i can tell you that my system should be able to play louder than it does with out breaking something, i have friends that have home gear also and they can listing alot louder than i can. I really dont even listen very loud very often but i would like to be able to and when i say loud i dont mean ear bleeding loud.

 

[Pyrrho]

It sounds to me like you have more than one problem. If it were just a matter of the speakers being hard to drive, I would expect it to destroy the receiver before it destroyed the amplifier. (If that is not the case, then Pioneer is even better than I thought, and I like Pioneer--I have just recommended, in another thread, that someone consider a Pioneer or Yamaha receiver over several other brands.) That leads me to think that, if you have hooked everything up properly, the amplifier was defective. That, of course, does not explain your tweeter problem. I suspect that your speakers are to blame, especially since you do not seem to have been having problems with your Pioneer speakers.

This kind of thing is extremely difficult to diagnose long distance. It is too bad you don't have a trusted expert who can make a house call for you.

 

[captiankirk28]

Thanks
I am just about ready to start all over again so i know everything will be right.
About the Pioneer speakers, i have not really used them much but i think i am going to hook them up for awhile and see how things pan out. Maybe it is all my speakers fault but i just dont want to belive that, And not to mention that SVS will probley not belive that it is not my fault and it is their speakers that is the problem.

 

[TLS Guy]

Thanks
I am just about ready to start all over again so i know everything will be right.
About the Pioneer speakers, i have not really used them much but i think i am going to hook them up for awhile and see how things pan out. Maybe it is all my speakers fault but i just dont want to belive that, And not to mention that SVS will probley not belive that it is not my fault and it is their speakers that is the problem.

I think the problem is your choice of speaker. I suspect you are a rock aficionado. Now with the vogue for mastering this music with a lot of compression, the speakers do not get a break. In classical music although the power demands are even higher, they are for brief periods, as there is a lot of light and shade.

Now your speakers are have a sensitivity of only 85 db. I think you need to look at speakers with a sensitivity of 90 db plus. Every 3db increase in sensitivity halves the power from the amp for a given spl. So if you had speakers with a sensitivity of 91 db you would need only 25% of the same power from the amp for your favored spl. Now it is even more important than that, as the heating effect in the voice coil goes up by the square of the current.

So I don't think you would have to play those speakers all that loud to fry them, and I think you have, most likely.

 

[TLS Guy]

I think the problem is your choice of speaker. I suspect you are a rock aficionado. Now with the vogue for mastering this music with a lot of compression, the speakers do not get a break. In classical music although the power demands are even higher, they are for brief periods, as there is a lot of light and shade.

Now your speakers are have a sensitivity of only 85 db. I think you need to look at speakers with a sensitivity of 90 db plus. Every 3db increase in sensitivity halves the power from the amp for a given spl. So if you had speakers with a sensitivity of 91 db you would need only 25% of the same power from the amp for your favored spl. Now it is even more important than that, as the heating effect in the voice coil goes up by the square of the current.

So I don't think you would have to play those speakers all that loud to fry them, and I think you have, most likely.

I have just looked into your speakers further and I misquoted the sensitivity. SVS stated it is 87 db. They do not say whether it is 87 db 1 watt 1 meter, or 2.83 volts 1 meter. I looked at the Peerless pdfs for those drivers. It is a two and a half way speaker so those drivers are 8 ohm, so the speakers have to be four ohm or less, which is why they selected a four ohm tweeter.

The sensitivity is therefore 87 db 2.83 volts 1 meter. Now 2.83 volts is the voltage when applied to an 8 ohm load will consume I watt. So into a four ohm load two watts of power are consumed, so the speaker is actually 3db less sensitive on a power basis than it would be if it was an 8 ohm speaker.

Tymphany have stopped publishing the power handling of their Peerless drivers for some unknown reason. However Peerless are very middle of the road drivers. I suspect their continuous power rating is about 50 watts, and the peak instantaneous power about 150 watts.

So I think if you drove them hard continuously for several minutes you could heat up the voice coils quite fast. No Peerless drivers that I know of have high power motor systems. This drivers can be had in quantities of 10 plus for about $60 a piece. SVS are likely getting them for less than that.

Again I recommend that you listen at a lower level or get speakers of higher sensitivity and power handling capability.

 

[Ed Mullen]

The MTS-01 speakers have a sensitivity of 86.5 dB with a 2.83V input @ 1M in full space.

"Nominal impedance" can be interpreted in different ways, so we prefer to provide the actual Z-curve upon request (we've already provided it to captainkirk28). The MTS-01 nominal impedance will typically be interpreted as ~4 ohms by most loudspeaker designers. With that said, the electrical phase response is quite benign, and the speakers can be driven easily by any amp rated for 4-6 ohm loads. In fact, we've driven them with most popular brands of consumer AVR (which are typically rated for 6 ohms or higher) without difficulty.

We can provide all the specs and measurement data on our M-series speakers; just email us at Sales or Tech Support. Deciding what to display on the website is a balancing act falling somewhere between sufficient and TMI, but we can/will provide all the data to anyone who asks.

The original crossover design was not sufficiently protective of the tweeter. While I can count the total number of tweeter failures in the field on two hands (with thousands of units in the field), captainkirk28 was indeed responsible for the majority of them. Regardless, we decided to re-work the XO networks in the M-series speakers to be more protective of the tweeter. We also improved the acoustic phase response, frequency response, bass extension, and voicing in the process.

The reworked tweeter high pass is a Linkwitz-Riley 24 dB/octave at 1.85 kHz, and the tweeter response is over -20 dB @ 1 kHz relative to the average response level in the 2-5 kHz region. This is easily sufficiently protective of the tweeter in all applications unless the amplifier is being driven into clipping (which no tweeter will survive for long). cpatainkirk28 has the dubious distinction of being our only customer to blow a ScanSpeak D3004 tweeter with the new crossovers installed. That is exactly one (1) tweeter failure with the new XOs with thousands of D3004 AirCirc tweets in the field.

We suspected he was overdriving his Pioneer AVR, given his preference for up-converting 2 channel source material to 5/7 channels. This type of playback condition is very demanding on the AVR amp stage, and that - combined with the relatively low sensitivity and impedance of the M-series speakers - was a recipe for problems. We therefore encouraged captainkirk28 to purchase an external amp capable of driving 4 ohm loads and his choice of the Emotiva XPA-3 is a good one.

His XPA-3 went up in smoke within 15 minutes of being connected. The infant mortality rate of modern solid-state amps is low - but it does happen; he wouldn't be the first owner to watch a new amp go up in smoke. Nearly all modern amps have relays and/or fuses to protect against a dead-short or an otherwise dangerous load. Self destruction is not an acceptable means of informing the owner the connected load is unsafe. His amp was defective out of the box; I'm confident our speakers did not blow his amp.

If his M-series speakers were truly presenting such a load, his Pioneer AVR (which by all accounts has a far less robust amp stage than the Emotiva) would have long ago immediately gone into protect mode and refused to operate, and that simply hasn't been the case - he's been driving the speakers with his Pioneer AVR for months.

I've asked captainkirk28 to connect other speakers (he has some B&W and Pioneer units available) to his replacement Emotiva when it arrives - just to isolate the M-series speakers as a variable. If the amp survives a day or two without blowing up, he can connect our speakers without worry.

The only absolutes in life are death and taxes, and anything is possible, no matter how remote the odds. So in the extremely unlikely event his M-series speakers do fry the Emotiva after it has been broken in with other speakers, I've pledged to return them to the factory for inspection/measurement and refund his full purchase without question.

Ed Mullen
Product Development and Customer Service
SV Sound

 

[Adam]

I just saw this thread today. I had an Emotiva amp die very shortly after connecting it (within hours of running it at very low volume), so these things do happen. The replacement amp has worked flawlessly for over a year now. I agree with Ed and the others - I doubt that the speakers fried that amp. It was probably defective from the start, but I would suspect that the next one will be fine.

EDIT - Ed, you beat me to my comment and added your affiliation to SVS. I'd just suggest that you add that to your signature, which you should be able to do now that you have five posts. Then you don't need to remember to put it in. Thanks.

 

[TLS Guy]

The MTS-01 speakers have a sensitivity of 86.5 dB with a 2.83V input @ 1M in full space.

"Nominal impedance" can be interpreted in different ways, so we prefer to provide the actual Z-curve upon request (we've already provided it to captainkirk28). The MTS-01 nominal impedance will typically be interpreted as ~4 ohms by most loudspeaker designers. With that said, the electrical phase response is quite benign, and the speakers can be driven easily by any amp rated for 4-6 ohm loads. In fact, we've driven them with most popular brands of consumer AVR (which are typically rated for 6 ohms or higher) without difficulty.

We can provide all the specs and measurement data on our M-series speakers; just email us at Sales or Tech Support. Deciding what to display on the website is a balancing act falling somewhere between sufficient and TMI, but we can/will provide all the data to anyone who asks.

The original crossover design was not sufficiently protective of the tweeter. While I can count the total number of tweeter failures in the field on two hands (with thousands of units in the field), captainkirk28 was indeed responsible for the majority of them. Regardless, we decided to re-work the XO networks in the M-series speakers to be more protective of the tweeter. We also improved the acoustic phase response, frequency response, bass extension, and voicing in the process.

The reworked tweeter high pass is a Linkwitz-Riley 24 dB/octave at 1.85 kHz, and the tweeter response is over -20 dB @ 1 kHz relative to the average response level in the 2-5 kHz region. This is easily sufficiently protective of the tweeter in all applications unless the amplifier is being driven into clipping (which no tweeter will survive for long). cpatainkirk28 has the dubious distinction of being our only customer to blow a ScanSpeak D3004 tweeter with the new crossovers installed. That is exactly one (1) tweeter failure with the new XOs with thousands of D3004 AirCirc tweets in the field.

We suspected he was overdriving his Pioneer AVR, given his preference for up-converting 2 channel source material to 5/7 channels. This type of playback condition is very demanding on the AVR amp stage, and that - combined with the relatively low sensitivity and impedance of the M-series speakers - was a recipe for problems. We therefore encouraged captainkirk28 to purchase an external amp capable of driving 4 ohm loads and his choice of the Emotiva XPA-3 is a good one.

His XPA-3 went up in smoke within 15 minutes of being connected. The infant mortality rate of modern solid-state amps is low - but it does happen; he wouldn't be the first owner to watch a new amp go up in smoke. Nearly all modern amps have relays and/or fuses to protect against a dead-short or an otherwise dangerous load. Self destruction is not an acceptable means of informing the owner the connected load is unsafe. His amp was defective out of the box; I'm confident our speakers did not blow his amp.

If his M-series speakers were truly presenting such a load, his Pioneer AVR (which by all accounts has a far less robust amp stage than the Emotiva) would have long ago immediately gone into protect mode and refused to operate, and that simply hasn't been the case - he's been driving the speakers with his Pioneer AVR for months.

I've asked captainkirk28 to connect other speakers (he has some B&W and Pioneer units available) to his replacement Emotiva when it arrives - just to isolate the M-series speakers as a variable. If the amp survives a day or two without blowing up, he can connect our speakers without worry.

The only absolutes in life are death and taxes, and anything is possible, no matter how remote the odds. So in the extremely unlikely event his M-series speakers do fry the Emotiva after it has been broken in with other speakers, I've pledged to return them to the factory for inspection/measurement and refund his full purchase without question.

Ed Mullen
Product Development and Customer Service
SV Sound

Very Useful information.

However if he fried that tweeter fed from a fourth order crossover, then I would not bet the rent on his voice coils being OK. He is playing his rig far too loud!

 

[Ed Mullen]

Very Useful information.

However if he fried that tweeter fed from a fourth order crossover, then I would not bet the rent on his voice coils being OK. He is playing his rig far too loud!

Well, we did replace all of his blown tweets - so those VCs should be OK. And I think the Peerless woofs are fine.

It's not that he's playing the system too loud per se. I think the more accurate way to portray his situation is that his preferred playback level (and his preference for multi-channel music) is driving the AVR into clipping considering the fairly low sensitivity and impedance of the speakers.

The M-series speakers do like a lot of clean power; we've driven them with external amps (Rotel, Adcom, B&K, Outlaw, Parasound, ATI, Crown, etc.) in the 200-500 WPC/4ohm range to very loud levels without ever blowing a tweeter or causing compressed dynamics. I run my M-series front-stage with three Outlaw M200 monoblocks (300 watts/4 ohms). Our Euro dealer routinely drives the MTS-01 on full-range with a 500 WPC Rotel RB-1572 Icepower amp to very loud levels and they remain clean, dynamic, and effortless. The M-series can deliver the goods and are far from fragile if the amp is up to par.

Ed Mullen
Product Development and Customer Service
SV Sound

 

[Ed Mullen]

I just saw this thread today. I had an Emotiva amp die very shortly after connecting it (within hours of running it at very low volume), so these things do happen. The replacement amp has worked flawlessly for over a year now. I agree with Ed and the others - I doubt that the speakers fried that amp. It was probably defective from the start, but I would suspect that the next one will be fine.

EDIT - Ed, you beat me to my comment and added your affiliation to SVS. I'd just suggest that you add that to your signature, which you should be able to do now that you have five posts. Then you don't need to remember to put it in. Thanks.

Thanks Adam - I searched for several minutes under my control panel for a signature block, but I couldn't find one. I didn't realize there was a 5 post limit for that. I'll add it now...thanks.

Ed Mullen
Product Development and Customer Service
SV Sound