Over heated speakers

It sounds to me like you have DC (direct current, not AC, alternating current) going to your speaker. If you were to graph it, normal AC is what a speaker expects. The cone pushes forward and pulls back, at rest it’s at “zero”. With a DC offset, at rest is no longer at zero, it’s either idling pushing out or pulling in. This is very hard on a speaker motor, it will eventually overheat the voice coil and die.

If my guess is right you’d see it in a waveform editor like Audacity and it would be whatever sound file you’re feeding the RPi. Perhaps when you paused it went to pushing out a DC signal?

Of course that’s just an off-the-cuff answer.

KO

P.S. Welcome aboard!

Added: While walking my dog, I tried to think of tests.

  1. A multimeter across the terminals of the amplifier would show you DC, but not everyone has a multimeter available to them.

  2. Get the system into paused state, disconnect the speaker, then tap the terminals from the amplifier on a good speaker. If you hear a small pop it’s because there’s DC there.

If there’s a feature request to be made, it would be to the GStreamer team I think. “When pausing GStreamer, send a digital zero to the output.”

Again, all off the cuff and I may be wildly off-base.