Buying speakers ten or more years old a good idea?


Just wondering , if it is a loss of advances in speaker manufacture, or if to many problems arise to justify the large savings over younger or new speakers
acidfolk
I have been using the same pair of dynamic-driver, tower speakers ever since I bought them new in 1990. There have been at least 3 considerations I've needed to deal with over the years.

1) All the drivers have rubber surrounds, but it's still been necessary to treat them with a decent rubber preservative every few years or so, but that's very easy to do and not expensive.

2) I had the crossovers professionally refurbished in 2007. Crossovers do age, perhaps especially those with cheaper parts... I wouldn't expect you'd have to do that very often - once at some point during your ownership may well be enough. I removed the crossovers myself and shipped them to the service company, so I didn't have to deal with shipping the whole speakers. Cost: a bit less than $300 altogether.

3) Check to see if the used speakers you want use ferrofluid in the tweeters (or mids). After a few years or so (even if they've been in storage), the ferrofluid can dry out. In practice, discovering it can creep up on you and you may suddenly become aware of an otherwise unexplained channel imbalance in the highs and some loss in HF dynamics and power handling. Parts Express carries it and it's not too expensive. The only difficulty at first is learning how to remove and dismantle your tweeters so you can add some more fluid. But, then again, you would still really need to know how to do this, even if you were buying brand new speakers that use ferrofluid...just part of their maintenance. But, acquiring this skill can be a useful advantage for used speaker buyers since, often as not, they may be buying from individuals who possibly never fully understood this one real reason why they may have grown disenchanted with their performance. Anyone can take advantage of this: sellers, buyers and owners alike, but I suspect it may more commonly work for buyers and could possibly help you land a good bargain. But, in effect, I don't think there is functionally any difference between a tweeter (that's in otherwise good shape) with newly added ferrofluid and a brand new tweeter - they are essentially one and the same thing - top off their fluid and you instantly regain showroom performance from them...performance that you can easily hear.

Larryi said: "I hardly think that speaker technology is advancing such that ten year old speakers are necessarily inferior to newer models. There are MANY older designs that are terrific sounding and it is really more a matter of personal taste than technical advancement that will determine what is best". I completely agree. The old saying that there are plenty of both good and bad examples of speakers at every price point is very likely just as true today, I'm sure, as it was in 1939, so synergy together with personal preference is still the name of the game. But, many say that some of the best sounding mid and bass drivers ever produced were created from simple paper cones. If properly maintained, you can expect a good pair of speakers to last about 50 years.
I second vhiner. I have an 18 year old pair of thiel cs 3.6. I have used 4 different font end with them. Nad pre w/ Acurus a 250 amp, proceed pre and amp 2, classe ssp300 with ca 2200 and finally a classe cp800 with ct 300. IMO the classe is a better sonic match for the thiel which can be bright. With the upgrade of front end It has been hard to justify a speaker upgrade. They just sound very good not perfect but they do so much so well.
Hi, I have the JBL L7 speakers that I modded, they are from 1992, and sound wonderfull!, 5 degrees angled to the inside, 3 foot from rear and side walls, huge, focused soundstage that is revealing and very musical, cheers.
The L-R speakers that anchor my HT are Mirage M5si's, bought 17 years ago. I have no intention or reason to replace them. Ivan_nosnibor's post has some good advice I need to follow: redo the crossovers and top off the ferrofluid in the tweeters.

Crossovers: A few years ago I was using a 5-channel Adcom to biamp the Mirages and to power the center channel. I kept blowing a fuse, and an ohmmeter indicated that something was wonky with the individual halves of the crossover, while the full crossover presented a reasonably stable load. I went back to bi-wiring, but the blown fuses do point to a crossover problem.

Tweeters: When I run my pre/pro's automated speaker setup, the white noise indicates some differences among the four tweeters (they're bipolar) in the M5si's. While that may also point to the crossover problem, it may also be the ferrofluid (assuming my tweeters use it). So anyway, I am overdue to take those in for some maintenance, after which I will REALLY have no reason to replace them.
mine are almost 20 years old. i purchased them $1100 and so far replaced one woofer $450, but it was my fault for cueing needle onto record, but forgetting to mute preamp :-). this plus the age of speaker played the bad part.

i'm still a happy camper because for the modern speakers of the same class i'd had to be within 5 figures minimum.
makes sense eveneven if you have to service them. just make sure that parts are available. buy ones with existing service.

vintages such as ohm, aerial, klipsch, jbl, tannoy, alon, vandersteen, snell are not any worse than modern ones at the fraction of price.

you may also optionally want to replace damping material if the one is being used with fresh one and properly tighten up bolts for each speaker driver onto the cabinette. clean the terminals with deoxidising solution and perhaps reapply fresh solder onto the crossover parts and driver connections as these are directly exposed to vibration and within the time become dry cracked and cold.