Broken speakers

I think my PC speakers are knackered. :(

Well, not the speakers, exactly, but somethings gone pear-shaped: I have a 3-speaker system where everything plugs into the bass speaker, including power cable. Now, when the speaker power is turned on, I just get a pulsing sound, like a heartbeat (about 2 beats a second). This is even when the PC is turned off.

Trying to play a sound from the PC has no effect - I just keep getting the heartbeat noise.

Long shot: does anyone know why this is happening and if it can be fixed, or are they destined for the bin?

There's no reason why they can't be fixed, but unless you're gonna do the work yourself, it'll probably be cheaper to just buy a new set of speakers.

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Well that was a completely pointless post. :o/
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Probrably a blown capacitor.

I'd say if its not under warranty, open it up and give it a good clean. I had a small pin fall no the circuitry a few years back and it stopped the safety-catch from actually allowing the speakers to activate.

Yeah, I've opened it up but everything is spotless as all circuitry is housed in a selead unit.

I couldn't see anything that was obviously 'blown', but I think it could well be a blown cap. It seems to be a problem related to the power supply as the power LED flashes on/off in sync with the 'heartbeat' pulse sound. It sounds exactly like that alien locator gizmo them had in the first Alien film. It's starting to spook me out! :P

Maybe a dry joint?

I reckon it could be fixed quite easily by someone with electronics know-how. Just seems a shame to bin them.

Big10p: I'm hijacking this thread for your info. My wanadoo thing is 1Mbit but when checking my statement today it said "see if you can go faster" or something. I clicked it and it said I could have 2Mbit for a one-off £20 fee, I'd rather it was £0 like BT, but what the hell I clicked it, now we'll see if it works, they say up to 10 days. Are you on 2Mbit yet? Later they'll bring in 8Mb but us westcountry boys can't get it yet.

Grey: I'm still on 1Mbit but when I got broadband it was a 2Mbit deal - my line can't handle 2Mbit yet, though. I sure won't be paying another fee when/if 2Mbit becomes available, though.

I haven't checked my latest statement yet - I'll go look in a min.

Yeah, I went to the page that checks if you can get 8Mbit and the first thing to do was specify which county you live in - Somerset wasn't even on the list! lol. I'm not holding my breath for 8Mbit. :P

[edit] just checked and 1Mbit is the fastest I can get at the mo.

I just moved house and my wanadoo connection went from 1MB to 2MB *thumbs up

As for the speakers, unless they cost alot I would bin them!

Does this sound come out of all the speakers or just the bass one?

If I have all speakers plugged in then the sound mainly comes from the right speaker. That's the 'main' speaker with the volume control and power LED. If I unplug the speakers from the bass speaker, the sound comes from the bass speaker, but louder.

They didn't cost a huge amount but they are black to match my all-black PC and are custom badged with my sig image. :)

...plus, I can't really afford to buy a new set. :/

Sounds like a cap is dead. Really tricky one to fix. First find the failed component, desolder it, find the correct replacement part, solder it... No guarantee that it isn't a design flaw that caused the unit to fail in the first place.

Save your pennies and get a proper hifi amp + speaker setup from richersounds.

Could be. The speaker system has a built-in sleep mode that powers down the speakers if no sound is played after a set period. Not sure of the point of it as I only found it annoying. The constant powering up/down probably caused a cap to blow, I reckon.

However, I am starting to suspect my surge protected powerstrip. ALL the caps on my mobo blew a couple of months back, and when I say blew, I mean BLEW - they made a very loud bang! :/ I put that down to a fubared PSU at the time, but maybe the powerstip caused the PSU to burn in the first place!?

Nah, I'm not bothered about quality sound. I'm currently using the mono speaker built into my monitor. Nice. ;P

I have a real pet hate regarding 'surge protectors' in all their guises.

At best, they will soften the incoming AC to remove general RF noise. At worst, they will quite happily sit there converting a (reasonably accurate) 50/60Hz sine wave into a square wave (with or without lead-in and lead-out peaks). Sure, they'll protect against a bit of a surge, but anything you plug into it that uses a switched mode transformer is going to have a really hard time of it.

I'm surprised your motherboard blew instead of your computer's PSU, but I'm not surprised your speakers didn't last.

Resign the surge strip to the bin. If you really want to protect your gear, get a line interative UPS, preferably from Leibert.

It's your crowbar diode up-setting the reverse biased negative feed back loop...Obviously...

For what its worth, I've had speakers stop working, and fixed it by going into Windows sound options and changing the speaker layout setup. Downloading new sound drivers could have been the culprit in my case, but I think it has happened before after a Windows Update.

this kind of error usually happen when input capacitor/resistor bridge is damaged..another reason can be that your output block capacitors on power amplifier side is broken and since they working as a differential output (mostly for computer amplifiers), what you have is short cut bridging of your signal over one of the broken capacitor in power chain, and thats why you hear 'pumping' no matter is it signal in or not...one of the capacitors releasing over you RC brigdges..it shouldnt be big deal to fix this, so i suggest bring that to any place where they can reapir electronic stuff, and it will work...any Audio service will do that without any problems...if you can control VOLUME, while you have this 'pumping', almost 100% that one of the capacitors in oitput is dead..

Realign your graviton emitters, bypass the plasma regulators and give it a good kick in the flux-capacitor.

Then shake well before use.

I have to agree with vinylpusher, PC speakers are the pits. Decent amp and speakers are the way to go. You can pick up something that sounds reasonable for around £150. Granted a set of PC speakers only costs £15 but hey. But of course you'll be wanting a good sound card too, external sound cards give better sound quality as there's much less interferance from the other computer components.

I find it bizarre that people are happy to spend £200 on a vid card and then just use the built in sound from their motherboard.

Anyway... That's just my opinion!

Sound is a lot more subjective than video I guess...

I have a bottom-of-the-line 5.1 surround sound soundcard for a whopping $7.50(*) and a set of 5.1 logitech speakers that were about $50 or so, and to my ears I don't hear much room for improvement.

Now, what I don't get is how some people spend bazillions of dollars on a PC, and then skimp out on spending the extra 10 bucks to get an optical mouse.

(*) Only reason I didn't use the onboard sound is that, like most, in 5.1 surround sound mode you cannot have a microphone plugged in at the same time. Very inconvenient when you also do voice chat on the PC. That plugin card had the three speaker hookups as well as line-in and microphone, plus it gave me a midi-port to hook up a joystick.

And on the subject of broken speakers: check your cables as well. My last pair of speakers got fried after one of my cats bit through the 18V DC power cable.

Well, the PSU did go first and subsequently took out the mobo and HD - I had to replace the lot. I'm starting to get paranoid about my powerstrip, now. :/ It is a good make, though: APC.

Yep, I think volume control worked. Can't remember TBH and I've unplugged everything now. :)

"surge protected" powerstrip??? How much did you pay for this "surge protected" powerstrip??? It don't not sound very much surge protectin to me if it blew out the caps on your mobo!!!

Rook: I don't know for sure that the powerstrip is at fault - I'm just starting to suspect it. :)

I've got a Kenwood amp and Warfedale speakers, sounds loads better than pappy little speakers, but I'm a musician too, so maybe I notice more?