I was messing around with the WahWah effect, then later on the speaker had started to emit static noises.
I removed all sound from that speaker, and played only the left. (the ‘right’ one died)
A day later, I come back. Up the sound, still static. Mess around with Audacity for a bit, and it’s fixed?!
I close Audacity, re-open it… and they’re both screwed up.
After about 20 minutes of changing the sliders, and open/closing the program, I’ve got them both to work again.
Anyone else have this occur? What is going on!? is the speaker not actually broken, and is Audacity just screwing with me? 
It’s very odd…
Audacity has volume controls independent of the computer, so even if you have the computer sound relatively even, you can boost the Audacity playback volume enough to overload the speakers.
Effects are a whole different world. If you do anything to greatly increase the very low pitch tones of the music on a track (thumping trance/electro/EDM), you can put the speakers on the floor in pain even though you can’t hear anything unusual. Same with extreme high pitched sounds. You can fry a tweeter by accident and drive the dog crazy but not be able to hear anything.
If you smell burning and the sound gets dull and muffled, that could be what happened.
If you got the show from somewhere that created a damaged track, say for example, with DC in addition to the show, that can damage speakers, too. That can cause bass cracking or popping.
Effect > Normalize: [X] Remove DC > OK
Don’t check anything else. Did that help?
All these problems are less likely with large sound systems, but if you have smaller “computer speakers,” you can easily make your own troubles while you’re messing around with settings and effects.
Koz
You can only make playback louder independent of the computer volume by using the -…+ gain slider on the Track Control Panel. Turning the output volume up on Audacity’s Mixer Toolbar makes the computer volume louder.
Gale