Speakers to hang on to for LIFE

to hang on for life, they better be planars

I can't imagine you guys/girls are really serious. You mean to tell me with your so called hyper hearing that them old ragged speakers you have are as good as what's produced today?

I mean, I got 11 year old Stages and they were terriffic in their day and are still pretty good in the midrange, but there are speakers out there that cost less today than the Stages did 11 years ago and have the midrange magic and are better in other ways.Plus they don't dominate a room.

Just because I own them though, doesn't make them saintly.

If loudspeakers didn't improve in every parameter in the last 10-20 years, then we wouldn't even be at this web site. For the industry would have gone outa business.

C'mon folks, face the music, your speakers that you so cherish from the by gone days are far from top shelf any longer. Most of them are nothing more than boat anchors at this point. Even my Stages.

Almost 25 years ago I got this speaker kit by a company called "Fried". Designed by a gentleman named Bud Fried.
Well, I have listened to a lot of other speakers over the course, and these do everything right. The voicing and midrange is excellent. I have found that they go down cleanly to 40hz, and they sound a heck of a lot better than
a lot of current speakers that are way fancier, bigger, and
certainly more expensive. I see an ccasional "Fried" speaker on this site, and I believe they are still in business. I will always keep these, at $299 for these a long
time ago, they will always have a place somewhere.

Although I'm in the market for a significant speaker upgrade, I've been using a pair of the original Boston Acoustics A200, Andy Petite's first design after leaving Advent c1981 for nearly that long now. I've upgraded the caps in the crossover, bypassed the fuses, spiked the cabinets, and put in new woofers from BA a couple years ago when the old surrounds wore through. I liked them the first time I heard them and they've definitely stood the test of time for me, despite my electronics having improved a couple orders of magnitude.

I find the frequency balance ideal and the detail resolution to be surprisingly good, enough to discern all cables and electronics upstream. Their HF dispersion is near perfect. The biggest deficit is bass, the 10" acoustic suspension woofer not having nearly the articulation of more modern designs, and the fact they were designed to be against a wall for proper bass extension - much is lost when they're centered in the room. With their wide front baffles they also sound 'boxier' than the narrow-profile current spkrs, though this does make for a very stable soundstage, at least laterally.

In my recent quest for my next speaker, I am amazed how well these compare with anything under $3K. Of course, that makes it all that much harder (or pricier) to find a spkr that significantly improves on these in all areas...

Steveallen, I'm with you. Prices are down, technology has progressed, and anyone who comes into the game with the idea of hanging onto *anything* 'for life' is shutting him/herself off from the progress that's happening all the time.

That's not to say that you should not hang on to good stuff for a long time if you can't find anything that will beat it--but you should recognize that eventually something will.