Mackie HR824 with the amazing silent woofer!

[Ryan Wasoba]

I bought a set of HR824s on Craigslist for stupid cheap, and when i took them home one of the woofers was out. I went into the situation knowing that something like that might happen, taking the deal with a grain of salt and knowing that, even if i had to replace something, i'd still come out on top. I'ts my first set of "real" monitors so I'm a little naive about what to do. (say what you will about hte HR824s being "real monitors" or not, but i'm moving up from a set of Tascam monitors that are basically glorified computer speakers)

Like i said, one woofer is out. The tweeter still makes sound and the woofer isnt necessarily making bizarre, typical "blown speaker" sounds, and if it is, it's very quiet and is being drowned out by the tweeter. I'm wondering if anybody has had a similar experience with their HR824s. i can order a speaker from Mackie direct as a replacement, but could it be something other than the speaker itself?

[rwc]

The only way you can know is to find out.

take out the woofer

measure voltage coming out of the two wires connecting to the woofer with a multimeter. have the meter set to A/C.

If you see 0, it's probably the amp/crossover.

Try switching with the woofer in the other speaker. So you know if it's the woofer or the amp/crossover.

Measure from the emitter tab of the transistor for the woofer.

to make it sound more english the transistor is the thing that looks different than most everything else on the amp inside and aside from power capacitors is usually the biggest, and usually black or silver colored. it's the thing that takes the wall power after converted to DC and turns it into a bigger version of the base signal.. so it has 3 legs. base signal, collector voltage, emitter sound! this is usually the most likely culprit to be broken, but sometimes it is not.

usually there's a resistor from the emitter, to the speaker. sometimes there's the emitter going to a resistor then from the resistor going to another resistor and a cap to someplace else for negative feedback/distortion correction. any of these things could be messed up and causing it to not work.

then there's where the woofer attaches to the tab that the wire from the amp attaches to.

any one of these connections could be intermittent, and any one of the components described above are what I expect to be bad looking inside an active speaker.

I fixed a pair of fucked tannoy actives last week that have similar internals to the hr824s, I would imagine, and my procedure was to check all of those things above.

[calaverasgrandes]

I've had BRAND NEW mackie active speakers show up with parts inside loose.
They have slid a bit in quality dontrol sonce they went overseas.