cats and speakers - looking for clues

sounds_real_audio makes a great (and humorous) point about listening to music with a clawed cat in one’s lap. A sudden crescendo can send a cat scrambling and leaving skid marks on the hoo-hoo! 🤣🤣

Wow, this is amazing ! I have not expected my question can produce such an abundance of comments, let alone stories. I read through each and every post and am grateful for all of them. This is all incredible material to ponder on and learn from. I am happy to conclude that the overall experience on "cats and speakers", shared here, is positive. My quick conclusion from reading your reflections: although cats may have mischievous sides, they are generally not known for merciless acts of speakers shredding. Keeping the grills off, using speaker-covers, and, occasionally, applying a citrus-spray, can be all helpful in controlling the situation. And, if we are a bit lucky, there is actually a chance our cat will enjoy listening to the music, as Ben [the cat] used to. Thank you everyone for pitching in. Cheers and greetings for now and I will try to come back with an update, when the eagle lands...   Once again, big thanks !

I have 4 cats and 3 dogs at the moment. They hang out at times and don't mess anything up.

I keep the doors closed when I am not in the room, listening rooms are in the basement. When I crank it up, I send them out anyways. They have 2 other floors to go buck wild, zoomies, whatever, if they want to, but, they are well behaved in my sound room.

I had an old cat who screwed up a panel a bit around 20 years ago. But, i was on work travel for weeks and my wife accidentally left a door open sometime in my old house.

If you are in a dedicated room with a door that can be shut, there is no issue.

I have 2 cats, and 2 set of floor standing speakers, AE 509’s and Golden Ear Triton 7’s. I have numerous scratch post and boxes with scratch pads inside. My cats do sometimes end up sitting on top of my speakers so I put a rubber mat on top of the AE 509's to protect the top of the grills,.but they’ve never scratched the grills on either set. I do have to lint brush the Golden Ears often but other than that they’ve been untouched. My cats have access to both rooms 24/7.

When I had Maggie’s ..SMMG and then 1.6’s, we had 3 cats. My wife found these lightweight spiked panels and I pessimistically surrounded the speaker panels with them. The cats never got near the speakers... One step on a spike panel was all they needed to get the message. 

Cat deterrent panels