speaker seal compromised sound (2024)

A small leak should hurt anything unless you get some whistling or other strange effects.

The sealed enclosure affects the woofer/bass and it you think about the amount of air the woofer is moving/vibrating a small leak won't have much effect.

And of course a ported speaker isn't sealed and again a small leak is insignificant compared to the larger tuned port.

If you want to check your speakers for leaks and resonances then manually slowly scan up and down using this sine wave generator. Don't go too too loud when testing the tweeters. For testing the woofers you should be able to get a fair amount of volume from them when scanning them. Any cabinet resonances or leaks will usually show up as pretty obvious when scanning this way.

DVDdoug said:

And of course a ported speaker isn't sealed and again a small leak is insignificant compared to the larger tuned port.

Click to expand...

Not quite true. A leaky ported cabinet reduces the box Q factor in the same way than in a sealed speaker.

From my own experiments I found that any small leak in a cabinet (ported or sealed) gets way more annyoing acoustically (chuffing noise) than it reflects in a change of the acoustic alignment. A ported box most often has enough port noise to mask the "pfff"-noise from leaks, though.

Doodski said:

If you want to check your speakers for leaks and resonances then manually slowly scan up and down using this sine wave generator. Don't go too too loud when testing the tweeters. For testing the woofers you should be able to get a fair amount of volume from them when scanning them. Any cabinet resonances or leaks will usually show up as pretty obvious when scanning this way.

Online Tone Generator - generate pure tones of any frequency

szynalski.com

Click to expand...

ic, so basically if it's leaking it should show up as some buzzing sound or similar at the leaking spot.

YSC said:

ic, so basically if it's leaking it should show up as some buzzing sound or similar at the leaking spot.

Click to expand...

Yes, that's the idea and sometimes the issue will arise because of cabinet issues, loose screws or cracked glue etc. So diagnose and proceed accordingly.

YSC said:

See Also

How to Keep the Sound Inside a Room & Stop It From Leaving

ic, so basically if it's leaking it should show up as some buzzing sound or similar at the leaking spot.

Click to expand...

For what its worth, I would try to stay lower than about 2 kHz or so, or you could end up hearing tweeter resonances/breakup, instead. This will also prevent you from damaging the tweeters, too. If you have an old garden hose you are not using you can cut a 4' section out of it and use it as a stethoscope. Similar to the old mechanics trick of using 3/4" heater hose to locate engine noises/vacuum leaks. Basically you put one end up to your ear, and use the other end to probe around to locate the source of noise. Keep the volume sensible, obviously. The leak itself could be very loud at higher SPLs. The linked generator has an option for left/right output, so basically you can test each speaker by itself and search for the problem spots if you hear any during the sweeps. Keep in mind that there can be cabinet, port, and cone resonances as well, and these very often show up in manual sweeps on typical speakers as buzzing or vibrating noises.

Below is typically what leaks sound like (taken from another thread here at ASR):

@YSC

Here is how cabinet air leakage sounds:
(it is actually 'driver leakage' due to improperly insulated drivers)

and this is how it sounds when fixed:

(applied acoustic rubber foam by CTK)

ppataki said:

@YSC

Here is how cabinet air leakage sounds:
(it is actually 'driver leakage' due to improperly insulated drivers)

New video by Peter Pataki

photos.app.goo.gl

and this is how it sounds when fixed:

New video by Peter Pataki

photos.app.goo.gl

(applied acoustic rubber foam by CTK)

Click to expand...

That is very pronounced effect!

YSC said:

That is very pronounced effect!

Click to expand...

If its bad enough, it can cause a lot of distortion. This is not only just from the leak, but also potentially generating a pressure differential in the cabinet. Had this happen with car subs that had leaky dust caps (and from the looks of it in the first video ppataki posted). The cones would just suck right into the baskets with bass and sound really weird. It can also adversely effect the characteristics of the cabinet as well if its a really bad leak. From my experience with a single tone at low frequencies its usually pretty obvious as a hissing type sound and not a pure tone like it should be. If the enclosure is ported, its a bit different since the pressure in the cabinet can vary. I would think it would be worst around the frequency the port is tuned to.

YSC said:

just wonders what would a leaking speaker sound like, would it be really obvious?

Click to expand...

Most probably not "really obvious".
I'd check all suspicious points with nearfield mic measurements.
In real life with unknown real material distortions/noises must be really high to be obvious, especially if they are harmonics of main tones and not atonal whistles/buzz.
But it's my experience, and my musical hearing is really bad, maybe yours is more supsceptable for additional tones, it's very individual.

YSC said:

just wonders what would a leaking speaker sound like, would it be really obvious?

Click to expand...

How bad of a leak?

Some amount of leakage factor is build into the design for example when you use the TS parameters to design a box of a certain volume.

It is very rare that a box is completely air tight and actually you would not want that at all. Think about how changes in climate and air pressure would ruin a box design that can not adapt.

Some people have has an issues with air tight tweeter housings that could not adapt and the solution is to drill a small hole in the chamber.

Many drivers leak by design such as many drivers with phase plugs or drivers with intentionally lossy dustcaps.
These traits are built into the driver and would be considered part of the design.

While a ported box acts as if it was a sealed box through much of the frequency range and port is tuned it obviously ultimately has a hole where are pressure can normalize. Large large leaks are still an issue and small leaks considered normal.

In all cases though small leaks are assumed in the design calculations by good programs.