cats and speakers - looking for clues

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

Keep scratching blocks on the floor spread around the house, not vertical scratching posts. Get them in young and in the habit of scratching scratch blocks laying on the floor instead.