sbainb

For the past couple of months I have been living with an annoying buzzing/distorted sound from the 6”x 9” HK subwoofer (on the rear shelf of my 2009 W221 S63AMG) especially when driving the speaker hard with deep base tracks.

I’ve owned the vehicle for three years and the audio system has always performed distortion free. Out of the blue the car began producing this awful buzz/humm/vibration that initially had me convinced the rear shelf or a surrounding component had shaken itself loose. After much investigation I have ruled this out and was resigned to believing the speaker itself had blown. Fast forward to two weeks ago when I was in the trunk scoping the layout of a pending audio upgrade and I started prodding and poking the 6"x9" subwoofer cone on the underside (gently). At first I noticed the cone was kind of stiff so I pressed a little harder and it gave - and became elastic-like and moved smoothly and freely. Thinking this odd I started the car and began belting a bass-heavy track and it sounded like new again. Weird.

It worked for about a day but then began buzzing again, and now its in this intermittent cycle of working fine for a little while after a poke or two only then to begin acting out again. Has anyone else had any experience with this or read of anything similar and might know of a repair - or am I better off just picking up another OEM unit?

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance.

chassis

Can you remove the subwoofer completely and give it a thorough inspection? That will show you if there is debris or a failure/broken part. Maybe the cone is cracked therefore delivers intermittent performance.

If it was mine I would pull it out, and most likely replace it with a new OEM unit.

sbainb

Thanks, for the response Chassis.

I search some more and found a couple of threads on other forum threads that detail the same/similar issue and came up with a couple of cheap fixes that seems to work so i'm going to give them a shot first as removing the sub requires a good bit of work from what I've read. For anyone else having this issue, here are the possible solutions I intend to try - I'll post back to see if either works:

1) https://www.benzworld.org/forums/w22...epair-fyi.html

2) https://mbworld.org/forums/s-class-w...fer-blown.html

sbainb

So it turns out that I had the exact same issue as several other owners in the link (1) above. My cone too was disconnected from the speaker frame/housing on the leading (front of vehicle) edge - about 120 degrees of separation, and I too seem to have repaired the issue with some good ol' Elmers rubber cement (with the brush applicator in the lid) for a grand total of $4 from Walmart. I applied two liberal coats and left the first one try for about an hr and the second overnight.

Hope this helps others who might experience the same issue.

chassis

Least expensive Mercedes repair ever! Congratulations.