Phoenix Gold Phorum

is it bad to use the ol' "pop the speaker with a 9volt or a cordless drill battery" trick to see what goes where?

You can even do it with a smaller battery. Shouldn't hurt a thing. That was how I learned to do a quick test of speakers. Also brenz has commented on it before also.

no its fine.

basicly you are playing a wave through the spaker (i think 60 for some reason...but dont quote me) at a certain voltage (9 in your case)

that is the same thing your amp is doing when you play a test tone through it, and with more then 9 volts!

Just tap the leads to the battery, do not hold them there and you'll be fine. If you hold them there you may have issues do to dead short/heat build up.

The battery will put out 9 volts... DC, so it's not an AC wave.

Basically it pushes the speaker out in one direction depending on which way you can hook the battery up. If the speaker comes forward when you hook + to +, - to -, then it is set up properly. Sometimes terminals end up being mislabeled, and the woofer will actually pull back when you connect it.

Don't leave it hooked up like this for too long. A speaker is designed to cool itself by venting the air while it moves back and forth. Since this is DC, it shouldn't move back, so it will heat up faster than normal.

Yep, I have made a few reverse polarity speaker poppers. Why reverse polarity, you ask? Well have you ever popped a speaker with a cap in line? It doesn't eaxctly "pop", it more like a "tick", and then it won't "tick" again, until you eiter touch teh positive and negitive speaker wires together to discharge the cap or reverse the polarity.

i use two d batteries in series to get a 3 volt pack

that is more then enough to pop and find polarity of the woofer or mid