Vintage speakers with a modern receiver?

[evenprimes]

Hello all,

I'm taking the plunge and building a home theater/stereo system.

While I will be watching video, the kinds of movies I like don't normally need surround sound and my primary interest is music.

I have lined up a pair of my grandfather's speakers. They are old but very high quality, he was a real audiophile. My question is, assuming the speakers work at all, can I expect them to work well with a modern receiver? I'm looking at the Yamaha RX-V465 since that will let me hook in all the components I'm looking at.

I don't have the speakers yet, I'll be getting them in the next month or two so I can't examine them for technical details.

Thanks!

E

[mikec]

You do realize that speakers can and do wear. They may have been top of the line when the grandfather bought them, but they could sound like mud now. In some cases a good shop can rebuild them or you might use new speakers in the old boxes.

The Yamaha looks nice.

Not knowing what speakers and the specs makes giving an opinion difficult.

How old are they? 1940's? '50's? '70's? '90's?

[evenprimes]

I know the speakers can wear. Right now I'm assuming that the are from the 1970's, but that's just a guess. I'm fairly certain that the speakers haven't been used in at least 15 years, since that's when my grandfather died. I have to make time to get up to visit my mom, who has them today.

Assuming that the speakers are in good working order (big assumption I know) my concern was that I've read a few things where speakers designed to be stereo speakers can cause HT receivers to overheat.

I guess I'll just have to get them and see.

[revision3fan]

Find out the make and model of the speakers beforehand. Then, look up the specifications on the internet.

I would worry about the power handling capacity of the speakers and the power output of the amplifier. (The speakers' capacity, in Watts, should be higher than the output of the amplifier, also in Watts.)

[davemclain]

Many older speakers can sound amazingly good. I was GIVEN a set of Altec Iconic speakers a few years ago. Mine were built in the late 1960's with a 15 inch woofer and a horn. I built a single ended triode(300b) power amp to run them and even with only 8 watts per channel they sound great, really really good. I'm not convinced that a lot of hifi equipment of today is necessarily any better than what was available 40 or 50 years ago when it comes to sound quality.

One area that you might want to investigate is what sort of amplifier loading your old speakers will give to your amp. Many older speakers from the '60's and '70's can be 16 ohms and while this will not harm your amp or speaker in any way it can sometimes reduce the output from the amp by quite a bit especially if it's designed to produce maximum power at 4 ohms for instance.

Another factor worth thinking about when you're testing out your speakers was that back in the old days they tended to use low power drivers that were VERY efficient because the enclosure designs were often horn loaded. Horn loading gets a bad rep by some folks today because these designs were built for use with tube amp designs that tend to sound smoother and tend to be less sensitive to variations in loading/impedance because of the horn loaded design. Driving them with a solid state amp can bring out colorations that were not there to anywhere near the same degree when running off of a tube amp.

[revision3fan]

Find out the make and model of the speakers beforehand. Then, look up the specifications on the internet.

I would worry about the power handling capacity of the speakers and the power output of the amplifier. (The speakers' capacity, in Watts, should be higher than the output of the amplifier, also in Watts.)


The Yamaha RX-V465 has 105 Watts of power for each channel.

BE CAREFUL with high volumes.

[nav13eh]

Not being used for 15 years, they could either sound like crap and pop, or they could sound amazing. You should get them and try them out. push them to the max and see if they give, if they do, you shouldn't use them.

[davemclain]

In actual practice it's generally easier to damage a speaker by driving it using an amp that doesn't have enough power rather than too much. Amplifier clipping and the square waves produced are a lot tougher on a speaker than some overpowering on dynamic peaks.

As an example my bass guitar rig that I use in my band has an enclosure with two 10 inch drivers and a high frequency driver. It's rated at 500 watts yet I'm driving it with a 1200 watt amp that produces about 1000 watts into the 8 ohm load. It sounds great and the guy who builds the cabinets told me that as long as it sounds ok it is ok. In other words if it has some sort of distortion from overexcursion or amp clipping turn it DOWN! If not no damage will be done. So far I've used this setup for almost 5 years with no driver failures.

I say that you should use your ears and give the speakers a try, I'll bet that they probably sound great.