Speaker diagnosis

[eharri3 10+ year member]

I got a subtle crackling in certain loud extreme high notes on only certain parts of certain specific songs on one CD. Can't figure out if my system's so good that I can now detect small imperfections in the recording or if this is the only CD that hits just the right note at the right volume to cause the problem (it's BB King's guitar Lucille, so it's hits highs in a way you don't really hear from alot of other recordings.)

Wondering what anybody thinks of maybe me downloading a 1000 and a 12000 HZ tone to test both hte mids and the tweets, playing at medium volume, and fading from left front to right front with each tone to verify whether this is actually a problem in the wiring or a problem with a speaker before I go to the trouble of ripping my door panel off and checking wires or having someone else do it.

I've switched to different RCA connections on the amp and reversed it to get the same sounds but out of the driver's side speakers rather than the passenger's side, leading me to believe it's likely an RCA issue of some kind rather than with speaker wiring or the amp but I want to verify if I can with tones before I go any further.

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[DidUHearThat? 10+ year member]

It's quite possible it's just the recording. Unfortunetly, thanks to ipods/MP3's most modern recordings are acutally of lower quality than just a few years ago. They're designed to sound good on earbuds from an Ipod at the lowest possible cost. Not sound great on a high quality system.

Listen to the same portion of the recording with good quality headphones and see if the distortion is still there. I can hear lots of imperfections in recordings on my system and more with good studio grade headphones. Live recordings are especially prone to quality problems.

If you can't repeat the distortion with headphones or on another system it could be your system. Do you hear it at lower volumes or only when it's loud? Not all CD players playback the same either. I have a very good CD player (high end Dennon) in my car, but it doesn't like certain disks, and I hear distortions from a few albums that I don't get in other CD players. It depends on how it was recorded and coded. Usually my CD player sounds better than any other player I own.

MP3's ****.