What to ask when buying used speakers?

The best thing to ask for when buying used speakers is a good deal.

Always ask for good or better deal.

I'm lucky living in Southern California, where there's a huge range of used audio within an hour's drive. While I hate gambling in general and never go to Vegas, I really enjoy the process of taking a risk and meeting a seller at their house for a local transaction and pick-up of a piece of gear. I've bought Quad ESL's, Klipsch Cornwalls, Altec 604's, Snell Model E's, and Monitor Audio MA-3's this way. The Snell's, from a used gear store, at a low price, were the only ones that gave me trouble. But I could see the tweeters' coatings were cracked, and I had fun cleaning the old coating off and replacing it with shellac, which restored the highs nicely. Classic designs have good resale here, so to me it's a bigger gamble spending a ton of money on new speakers whose sound will keep changing for weeks as they break in, and whose resale goes through the floor as soon as they're in your door. Spending time with speakers at home, experimenting with amps and placement is the only way learn how to get what I like from my gear. In-person visual inspection, hearing a test with music you know, chatting up the seller and doing your research is fun and rewarding- whether you buy locally new or used. Buying new speakers shipped from a remote seller is the last thing I'd do.

This was a timely post; because I’m actually getting ready to replace all my speakers; I originally built out an entire theater room with Focal Chorus 836v/cc800v/sr800v; with 4x sr700v as front height and side surrounds … now I am in the process of a teardown and rebuild for sound proofing and two tiered seating arrangement. I have a full speaker matching setup which performs very nicely in 5.1.4 configuration (made mounts to angle and ceiling mount the sr700v, I have no real reason to sell other than the itch to have Focal Utopias… needless to say I’ve already started the Utopia journey and soon will have two full theater setups, which I don’t need … which leads to me to your original question; what to look out for when buying used. Condition of course; animals or not; smoker?; consistent climate controlled environment (not a cabin or beach house) and lastly WHY the person is selling; I’m in a situation where I just don’t need them; I’ve upgraded and I would like to keep them, but don’t have a place for them. Rather minimize and have the speakers be in a happy home being used versus in a closet and/or unhooked not being used.

What’s your budget?

Lots of good advice in the previous posts

I am in the UK and both my previous and current speakers were one ex dem and two used from a private individual near Kansas city.

Carmel 1s from a former YG distributor in Croatia and Kipod Signature Passives which are very rare but an exceptional speaker.

In both cases did a lot of due diligence first.Used Paypal for both purchases. Both were great buys at very good prices.

So yes it can be done successfully