Possibly Damaged Monitor

Hey all, hope everyone is doing well.

 

So as I've mentioned on a couple posts around here, I recently moved across the country for a graduate program in screen scoring, and as a matter of finances, had to move very minimally and have my family slowly mail me my studio gear. My monitors (Mackie MR5s, first gen) arrived finally over the last two days (had to get shipped in two different boxes), set them up for a remote recording session this morning, and immediately I notice that one speaker feels fainter than the other. I check the levels, and they match, which I seem to remember is how they had always been set. Open Logic, use the test oscillator with pink noise and then do a sine sweep for each channel, and it feels like signal starts disappearing in the speaker in question from about 80 Hz downward. I think I caught a "buzzy" sound around 56 Hz when I first switched to that speaker and sweeping, but it was brief enough that I'm not sure if that's what I heard or not (I moved a little too fast through the range).

 

I'm going to test it a couple different ways—change cables, use a different sound source, bypass my Big Knob entirely and just plug into the interface direct—but I'm expecting that I'll have to haul this thing down to the repair shop in town that shows up on Mackie's website. Does anyone have any recommendations on what else I can do to test it? If it is damaged, would it be better/cheaper to fix the speaker, or should I just start looking at new ones (and if so, what are all the film composers on here using these days)? Thanks in advance for the help!

If you have headphones, listen to some bass heavy music, and then switch to the mackies to see if you hear anything obvious.

If you have headphones, listen to some bass heavy music, and then switch to the mackies to see if you hear anything obvious.

 

Oh yeah, that's a good one. Thanks, I'll try that out too.

Test each speaker in the exact same spot in the room. You may well hit a dead spot or a resonant one with either speaker while the other is unaffected.

I run my system audio through Rogue Amoeba's 'SoundSource'. I use it to apply filters to the output from my Mac. On days when I have bad congestion in my head (-6 db on the bad side) I simply increase the gain on the 'bad' channel and even things out.

 

Sometimes a broken monitor could be a broken receiver

Put a gain plug-in on the output and swap left and right. Does the quiet speaker switch to the other side or remain on the same side?