Pretty sure this isn’t a board thing, but just a bad speaker. But since it’s a mission to open this hilt up, a second opinion would be nice.
- Normal level - sound distorts on swings.
- Very low level - sound is OK. (But that level realistically is too low to be described as acceptable).
SD card seems fast with good numbers in sdtest. Battery is at 3.4 volts which should be enough for clean sound, but I’m charging it now just in case.
Could someone just have a quick glance and confirm my thinking before I break out the toolbox.
Thanks as always.
I would guess speaker bad, or its hitting the pommel on excursion.
1 Like
Most likely a bad speaker. However, it could also be a problem with the amplifier or 5v booster.
I set the music track going at full volume and then tried manually shorting Batt+ to 5v with a jumper wire, but it made no difference. That said, I couldn’t make the music distort particularly - the distortion seems to happen mostly on swings and accent swings (but I couldn’t swing it while shorting those pads). But I’m guessing the fact that the short made no difference at all to how anything sounded suggests the amp/booster are OK?
It’s also possible that it’s a misconfigured smoothsw.ini
If the values are too high, it can lead to clipping, which could sound sort of like this.
True, but I don’t recommend doing that short on a board with a working booster, since it can potentially overload the booster… Next time, measure the 5v pad first…
Good to know.
Thanks Prof. 
As for the smoothswing.ini, it seems to be doing it on all fonts, most of which are tried and tested and been using for years. So yeh, it does seem like all roads lead back to the speaker.
Thanks as always for the help guys.
I’ve dealt with this. If the speaker tabs are accessible without fully disassembling (like the sides of the chassis have cutouts to leave room for the tabs) You might be able to get in there, cut one wire at the pad (to disable the speaker), pull a weee bit of excess out enough to strip 1-2mm off in case you want to reattch in place.
Then just try another speaker temp soldered to the board, or to the cut wire and the still-attached speaker pad…
TL;DR - Try another speaker?
Thanks Brian.
Although this one is quite unconventional with a square speaker. But I managed not only to source one from the UK (would’ve cost $65 to have a $5 dollar speaker shipped from USA! 
) but I managed to open the hilt up and swap it out without too much trauma.
Everything working great now, so it was the speaker at fault originally.
Thanks again for all the thoughts on it.
1 Like
