Recommendations for Vintage Speakers

There are some very good vintage speakers  and several of them have been suggested but the suggested JBL Century L100 is not one of them.Probably the worst sounding speaker I have owned.No crossover on the woofer so you get a heap of cone break up interfering with the rest and the tweeters sound terrible.Some people describe it as sizzle but it more like the sound of an arc welder.

I have owned most of the speakers suggested and some of them are very good but I think on balance Gale 401 are the best of the lot.Most of all they do not sound like boxes,are very refined yet also very dynamic and are great on a wide range of music. and sound very clean and composed even at high volume.Not so good on classical music for some reason but very good on everything else.
Toshiba SS 30 speakers circa 1960s also deserve a mention.Fabulous sounding things.

The Gales do sound big but the low end is very tight and textured and most especially rhythmical rather than hefty.Hefty for their size  I suppose because they have a two 8 inch woofers in a compact box.I have always wondered if part of the reason for them sounding so good is that they have a very high ratio of driver area to box surface area which should mean relatively less box colouration -which is exactly how they sound.Very very few modern speakers can match that.Perhaps some of the Magicos and the Dynaudio Confidence C1.