Great value vintage speakers

[dillweed4]

Hey guys,

Can anyone suggest some worthwhile vintage speakers for studio setups that you can find cheap on ebay etc? There is so many to look through... At the moment I have a pair of Mission 732's that sound pretty nice, but probably not ideal for monitoring purposes. I also have a pair of old B & O Beovox 3000 that are beastly, but also not really for monitoring.

I'm thinking makes like Gale, Spendor BC1's, Celestion etc..

[Chrisc_o]

Why vintage? For monitoring purposes speaker design has progressed quite a bit and costs have come down significantly in recent times. If you're either looking to save money or buy good quality the vintage market is not really the place to be looking.

[misterlong]

Hey
I am a massive fan of using vintage?? speakers for mixing

Celestion ditton 66 (what I use in my place. got them for £200)

Celestion ditton 25s (in my other studio up the country, ours are tri-amp wired with 66 crossovers and stuff got them for £125)

Celestion ditton 15s are good. mid/nearfield (One of my colleagues used to lug his about in a suitcase as reference everywhere he went to work)

Celestion Ditton 150s are real nice too. More modern sound.

All the aboves have the auxilliary bass radiator which allows closed boxes. bass is really nice and tight and controlled but huge!

I am biased. I love my celestions!!

long

[dillweed4]

Yeah I heard Celestion made some banging speakers back in the day

Originally Posted by misterlong

Hey
I am a massive fan of using vintage?? speakers for mixing

Celestion ditton 66 (what I use in my place. got them for £200)

Celestion ditton 25s (in my other studio up the country, ours are tri-amp wired with 66 crossovers and stuff got them for £125)

Celestion ditton 15s are good. mid/nearfield (One of my colleagues used to lug his about in a suitcase as reference everywhere he went to work)

Celestion Ditton 150s are real nice too. More modern sound.

All the aboves have the auxilliary bass radiator which allows closed boxes. bass is really nice and tight and controlled but huge!

I am biased. I love my celestions!!

long

[beingmf]

The classics yould be JBL 4311 (and some others from the 4xxx series). Caribou Ranch studios certainly weren't wrong

[dkelley]

Originally Posted by misterlong

All the aboves have the auxilliary bass radiator which allows closed boxes. bass is really nice and tight and controlled but huge!

just a note: acoustically speaking the design of a passive radiator speaker (which is what the celestion design is) is identical to that of a ported speaker. the sound is almost exactly the same as well. the difference is that mass is created physically with the passive radiator, where in a ported design the mass comes from the air itself and it's motion through the port.

The physics are in many ways the same, just a different way of getting there.

Passive radiator designs are no more closed box in how they work in physics than ported speakers. closed box speaker designs are completely different - with not a single part of the enclosure being allowed to flex or move in response to the pressure of air behind the woofer cone internally. your passive radiator design allows tons of internal air movement just like a ported design.

All that being said - ported designs, and passive radiator designs, are brilliant if properly executed. Too bad so many cheap speakers aren't designed to be flat in the bass (overly high system q).

anyway, enough of my physics lesson.

for my main large monitors I used vintage infinity RS-6B 3 ways with 2" dome mids, planar ribbon emit tweeters, and 8" (actually 9" but called 8" by infinity) woofers with very elaborate high order crossovers to reduce phase problems that I personally find very audible in low-order-crossover speakers.

exceptional speakers, like all of the infinities from the 1980s. I got mine for free.

THIS is one good reason to use high end vintage speakers.... you sometimes get insane deals on them because their big and old.

and no, loudspeaker design hasnt' actually changed or improved much in teh past 20 or 30 years. in fact some of the plastic diaphrams from the 80s and 90s (including those of my infinities) are actually inferior in many ways to the performance from high end well designed paper diaphrams which often have superior transient response, lower distortion from cone breakup at higher frequencies, and so on.

JBL for example were making some of the highest performance drivers ever measured back in the 1950s, and nothing has really surpassed that level of accuracy, low distortion, and so on.

So don't discount high end vintage speakers people. Some of them are astonishingly brilliant.

Most need capacitor replacements in the crossovers though if they're several decades old. And there certainly are many vintage speakers that are absolutely crap too LoL

[stevens119]

Originally Posted by dillweed4

Hey guys,

Can anyone suggest some worthwhile vintage speakers for studio setups that you can find cheap on ebay etc? There is so many to look through... At the moment I have a pair of Mission 732's that sound pretty nice, but probably not ideal for monitoring purposes. I also have a pair of old B & O Beovox 3000 that are beastly, but also not really for monitoring.

I'm thinking makes like Gale, Spendor BC1's, Celestion etc..

Love Mordaunt Short MS20's. I actually use them to hear what my plugins are doing to my audio. I can hear things in them that I can't hear in my Adam A7's. Hifi Speakers can be really cool. The Missions I have don't sound nearly as good. Monitor Audio Gold's are great as well. I appreciate having a hifi reference, out of the 5 speaker systems I flip through while mixing. I use auratones as a lo-fi reference.

[Bill Way]

Braun 700 & 800 series speakers from the early 70s, also marketed for a while by a/d/s. The sticky-dome midranges and tweeters (Fifa I think) are wonderful. Bass clean, fast, and never boomy. (A New York mastering studio used a pair of their legendary internally tri-amped LV-1020s until fairly recently.) Replacement drivers widely available. Give them the cleanest s/s amp you can find, like SAE or BGW.

WW

[dkelley]

speaking of vifa dome tweeters, they are used in focal and in the higher end larger vintage krk studio monitors, just for example.

They're also in the cheap (free on craigslist) energy ESM series monitors that I have two pairs of, one of which I modded like crazy (jbl woofers, modded interior volume, altered port length, completely redesigned crossovers) into my main near fields a couple years ago.

3/4" vifa tweeters are amazing things and all over craigslist free section in older speakers if you know what to look for.

Sometimes the coolest thing to do is pickup old speakers with known good components and build your own out of them (this is of course assuming you know a lot about speaker design, the math behind cabinet design and volume/performance calculations, how to measure the specs of a woofer, build crossovers, etc---- and if you dont' it's a really fun hobby to learn about if you're an audio engineer).

[dillweed4]

Has anyone got/heard a pair of Spendor BC1's? They were BBC standard back in the day I believe.