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Mechanical Fatigue and Load-Induced Aging of Loudspeaker Suspension

The mechanical suspension becomes more and more compliant over time changing the loudspeaker properties (e.g. resonance frequency) significantly. This aging process is reproducible and the decay of the stiffness can be modeled by accumulating the apparent power supplied to the suspension part and using an exponential relationship. The free parameters of this model are estimated from empirical data provided by on-line monitoring or intermittent measurements during regular power tests or other kinds of long-term testing. The identified model can be used to predict the load-induced aging for music or test signals having arbitrary spectral properties. New characteristics are being introduced which simplify the quality assessment of suspension parts and separate mechanical fatigue from the initial break-in effect. Practical experiments are performed to verify the model and to demonstrate the diagnostic value for selecting optimal suspension parts providing sufficient long-term stability.

Author: Klippel, Wolfgang
Affiliation: Klippel GmbH, Dresden, Germany
AES Convention:131 (October 2011) Paper Number:8474 Import into BibTeX
Subject:Loudspeakers

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