What does it sound like when a tweeter is going bad?

[polktiger]

About a month and a half ago I bought a used set of SDA 1Bs. The previous owner replaced one of the right tweeters serveral years ago, but the other is still an old SL tweeter.

On that speaker, I am getting intermittent static. I only hear it at lower listening volumes. I have swapped out the speaker cable and the interconnect from my AVR (being used at preamp) and the NAD amp running the SDAs. Both changes no fix.

I am about to try hooking a different pair of speakers up to the NAD amp to see if it is an amp problem. If that is not it, my next thought would be a speaker problem, but I wanted to get some ideas as to what a bad driver (most likely tweeter I guess) would sound like before I start throwing replacement drivers at it).

I don't know if it is related, but the sound also seems to be a little choppy with movies. I don't know if this is a mixture of the sound fields and SDA. Should I disconnect the SDA cord when watching movies? Also, the SDA cord does not plug in very tight, could that cause my staticy sound? Listening with that unplugged is something I will need to try too I guess.

Any suggestions or guidance on what bad drivers/tweeters will sound like?

[avguytx]

So it's the older SL tweeter that has the static? Have you swapped the tweeters from one side to the other to see if it follows the tweeter? That would be a quick determination. I had a couple of SL2000's that had issues, too, and replacing with known working units fixed that. What tweeter did he replace it with? Another SL or one of the new RD0's?

[heiney9]

Sounds like a bad tweeter, continue the swap for the good one to make sure. Do yourself a favor and just get (4) RD0's and be done with it. You can thank me later :)

H9

[polktiger]

Really I am not sure which tweeter is causing the static yet, but I will listen for it. Also, thanks for the idea of swapping with tweeter from other speaker, don't know why I didn't think of that

I think the new tweeter is an RDO. It is all black and he claims to have bought it from Polk about 4 years ago.

Ultimately I do plan to upgrade all the tweeters to the RDO, but if my static is an amp problem the money would need to go there first.

[ninerbj]

It will sound like Yoko Ono

[engtaz]

good one