His Master's Voice
April 9, 2006 12:21 PM   Subscribe

Is there any way to clean a discolored home entertainment speaker cover?

Apparently, one of our dogs decided it would be a good idea to mark (pee on) the corner of our tv stand...and in the process, discolor half of the cloth cover of one speaker from our home entertainment system. The speaker (like one of the grey ones pictured here) is covered in a pretty standard speaker-cover material...and there is seemingly no way remove the cover (but I could be wrong).

Any way to clean up the discolored cover?
posted by tpl1212 to Home & Garden (3 answers total)
 
Best answer: Capillary action is your friend. You need a quantity of clean white terrycloth rags, such as those you can buy at any auto parts store, and some Rug Doctor Pet Stain Remover, available anywhere Rug Doctor machines are rented (grocery and hardware stores).

With one rag, lightly saturate the stain area with the cleaning fluid, then blot dry with other clean rags. Repeat 4 or 5 times, as needed. The capillary action provided by blotting is extremely powerful, and if you blot until dry over several applications, you can reduce the stain contaminant left to a few parts per billion, if that. In fact, you may need to "clean" the entire grill area, to remove smoke and dust accumulations which you currently aren't noticing, because the cleaned area may wind up cleaner than areas you didn't treat.
posted by paulsc at 1:05 PM on April 9, 2006


I'd be surprised if there was no way to remove the cover, I don't know that I've seen many speakers like that. Sometimes you just gotta gently pry them off. If you could get them off, I'd recover them. Speaker cloth is available from places like crutchfield, or your local home/car audio store, probably. You could probably clean it if you get it off, also. The above advice probably would work but I'm a replacer more than a cleaner.
posted by RustyBrooks at 2:22 PM on April 9, 2006


Response by poster: Awesome, thanks for the tips. I'll try my hand at capillarizationally cleaning them...then i'll have a go at prying and recover.

If all that fails, i'll try selling my dog.

I kid, I kid.
posted by tpl1212 at 4:33 PM on April 10, 2006


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