Buying speakers ten or more years old a good idea?

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.

Earlier this year I pulled a pair of Sound Dynamics 300ti's from around the mid 1990s that had been stored (boxed) since 2001, part of that in a garage that got down as low as 36F in winter, and they sounded quite good, pretty much as I remembered them. Surprised me.