A Word of Wisdom on making your own sound fonts

[jsummit]

Hello Fellow Saber-smiths! I just learned a new thing the hard way! I recently started dabbling in trying to create my own sound font and it seems I didn't have the volume level down enough when mastering it, so when I loaded it onto my SD card, I ended up blowing out my speaker lol! Any other more experienced sound font creators have any recommendations on volume level? Maybe there was something else I may have done to break the speaker? Yes, I did 3 different tests to make sure is wasn't my board (thank goodness!). I officially have a dead speaker. Anyway, just purchased 2 new ones.

[hapki]

Not good. At least your card is OK. I don't understand how volume set in the sound file blew a speaker though. It seems like the maximum output from the card would not increase with volume in the sound file. I'm still learning about a lot of this though.

[FenixFire]

Technically volume alone cannot blow a speaker. Overdriving, more power than it is rated for, say driving a 2w speaker at 4w. And most common distortion. This is usually where people confuse volume, when it's actually the distortion I the input signal caused but increasing the power/volume without having an equalizer configured to adjust each frequency accordingly. In competitive audio competitions the distortion is usually the culprit for blown speakers...

[jsummit]

That would make sense as I had a lot of that in my sound mix. Any advice to correct that?

[Ty_Bomber]

Use an equalizer to drop out any sound under 200hz or so (the speakers can't go that low anyway). I also use an auto ducking tool to drop the volume of the hum while the sound is playing to keep it from distorting the sounds, or getting lost in the hum itself.

[jsummit]

What is an auto ducking tool? Does Audacity have that?

[jsummit]

Just looked it up on the Audacity manual.

[jsummit]

Replying to this and the other one concerning my speaker. It turns out it wasn't the new sound font, but rather the speaker holder in my new chassis design. I had the speaker pinned in with a PVC cap over the top of a PVC pipe, restricting the vibration of the speaker membrane and burning out the speaker. My son's chassis has a press-fit open mount and it works fine. Now that I've installed yet another new speaker lol, it works fine. Man, I feel like Thomas Edison with his 100 failures before something finally worked! Anyhow, I'm ordering an actual TCSS speaker holder and epoxying it to my PVC chassis.