Question for the speaker/computer geeks. Just got a new desk for my computer room. However, because of the new desk, the furniture had to be rearranged, which has presented me one dilemma.

I need to place my front right speaker for my audio system right underneath the desk where my computer sits. Granted, there's about three inches of air gap between the speaker and the computer. The computer wouldn't be sitting directly above the speaker either as the speaker sits further back on the desk than the computer does.

I'm curious what damage this will do, if any, to the computer. I know the HDD won't like magnets, but how about the rest of the computer? I've never heard of magnets interfering with boards or flash memory, but perhaps I'm uninformed.

I don't believe this speaker is shielded, although I suppose I could be wrong. Is there any way to test?

Thanks in advance,
-Chris.

I doubt the magnet is going to be enough to hurt the drive. It wont hurt anything else in the PC.

It's a fairly large speaker, although it's just got a couple tweeters in they top and 10" in the bottom.

I haven't had any trouble in the past with it being generally close to electronics. A couple months ago back though, I had an old Dell laptop, and I set it on there for just a few minutes whilst I was arranging stuff. After that, kaput, no drive could be detected Not in BIOS, Linux on CD or anything else. Strange thing was, I tossed the drive in a drawer for a bit and about 2 weeks ago, I tried putting it back in the Dell to find out what was actually wrong with it, and now it's working fine. :s

I've never seen that happen before. A dead drive is usually a dead drive. It's operating fine now, not even skipping a beat. I've just been weary of the speakers since that day.

Here's a shot of it to give you an idea.

[This message has been edited by Valkyrie (edited 10-24-2011).]

I remember back when I built my first home theater subwoofer, the woofer and the computer monitor (the old CRT style monitor) wouldn't play nicey-nice with each other. The magnet in the woofer was so powerful, it would turn the computer screen purplish from 6 feet away... SIX FEET AWAY! I ended up putting the subwoofer and computer monitor at opposite ends of the room, just to be safe.

That said, LCD monitors don't have that issue. And desktop hard drives are much more resistant to magnetism than laptop hard drives. So you should be good to go.

I remember that old purplish hue. That thing was such a piss off.

And unfortunately, this PC is a laptop and does use a 2.5" HDD. Perhaps it's a good excuse to spoil myself with an SSD.

I have put magnets on hard drives and not had any effect. If you ever take one apart you will know why.
But you do have to be careful with the board electronics. I degaussed a drive one time and it fried the board.

quote Originally posted by Jake_Dragon: I have put magnets on hard drives and not had any effect. If you ever take one apart you will know why. But you do have to be careful with the board electronics. I degaussed a drive one time and it fried the board.

Right, but a degaussing ring is far far more powerful than any speaker.

I have had a hard drive apart before, and those magnets are filthy! I've heard stories of them making people bleed!

However, I've also heard of the magnet in a money clip completely destroying HDs, which is what has me torn.

quote Originally posted by User00013170: Right, but a degaussing ring is far far more powerful than any speaker.

The only disk I would worry about is a floppy, you remember those. Like a thumb drive only flatter, larger and doesn't hold hardly any data

Short answer, yes it can damage the HDD.
It probably won't.

When everyone used CRTs it was easier to tell because the magnet would screw with the video if the speaker wasn't shielded. I've seen small electric fans and electric pencil sharpeners distort the display on a CRT. I've also seen magnets destroy hard drives, and I'm not talking about a degaussing ring.

It's like ESD precautions. Working on you PC on the living room carpet can cause static to fry the electronics, but chances are they won't. Any damage will likely be minor and degrade slowly over time so when it finally does fail, you can't tell if it was because of the static or not. Magnets around the PC are similar.