Sansui SP-5500.....WOW!

H

HiFiSoundGuy

Active Member
I went to a stereo shop to hear some Mcintosh XRT1K's...$20,000 and they had some old Sansui sp-5500's right next to the XRT1K's. I first heard the XRT1K's and they sounded GOOD! I then listened to the Sansui's.....these are the ones that they did not sell here in the states and I really liked these OLD SANSUI's better! I have never heard a sansui speaker sound this GOOD. They were using a Mcintosh MA6900 to compare the XRT1K's to the Sansui sp-5500's. Well....I have the sansui's in my house now I paid $450 for them. This is the BEST $450 I have ever paid in 30 years in this hobby!! :smoke:
 
Shoot, I wish you hadn't posted this (...well, almost! :D). I've been seeing a pair of those speakers in the audio wholesale market here for a week or so. No one has bought them yet, but I've looked at them several times and wondered because I'm sure those would have higher WAF than most comparably sized vintage speakers. I've passed on them, buying the DCM TF-700s instead. I don't think I made a mistake, but now you have me wondering if I could make my wife happier with no loss of sound quality if I swapped those Sansuis for, say, the HPM-100s I'm using for regular TV speakers.

...IF the Sansuis are really that good.... :scratch2: :headscrat :scratch2:
 
Wow. Beating out $20K speakers, that's saying quite a bit. I didn't know any of the old Sansui's were really very good. I'll keep this in mind if I ever see a pair. 120 lb each, that's some mass.
 
I just got lucky on these speakers.....in the right place at the right time. The guy that traded these in said that these sansui's were the best sansui's that sansui ever sold and that now speaker parts are very very hard to find......maybe these will last another 10 or 20 years. These speakers have only been on ebay a few times and go for a lot higher prices than I paid for mine!
 
I'm running a pair of these with a G-5000, in a 24X18 room with 12' ceilings and hardwood floors. They do sound good. you can see some pretty good welding on the horns. Built like tanks.
pretty sure the neighbors don't care for them though...
 
Love um, Wife does not! She said, I'm sick of the whole house shaking

I'm currently recapping a set of SP-2500, 4way, 5 speaker, 10" woofers, 2-6" Mid drivers. They are a very well built speaker, just like anything you would DYI.
I redid the first board, But I'm still not getting proper signal. I have read a little on them, the boast a true 4 way cross over. They seem to have 2 extra resisters in the Board compared to the cross-overs in my SP-X9700's which are also 4 way's.
I have also Just redid a set of SP-5500X's these sit on top of the SP-X9700 and sound very good.
But my Beloved SP-X9700's really rock the house. I have recapped the cross-overs and had the 4 horn tweeters recoiled and also upgraded the binding post's. There is just something about big 16" paper cone woofers and 8" Mid drivers that I Like with My Pioneer SX-1050. and I would put them up against a set of HPM-100 any day! Properly placed they sound Very large and detailed.
 
$450 for a set of 5500's? Wow...I should have held out longer on getting rid of the 7500's I had. I couldn't find an amp in my house that would make them sound good.
 
JFRogers01 said:
I'm currently recapping a set of SP-2500, 4way, 5 speaker, 10" woofers, 2-6" Mid drivers. They are a very well built speaker, just like anything you would DYI.
I redid the first board, But I'm still not getting proper signal. I have read a little on them, the boast a true 4 way cross over. They seem to have 2 extra resisters in the Board compared to the cross-overs in my SP-X9700's which are also 4 way's.
I have also Just redid a set of SP-5500X's these sit on top of the SP-X9700 and sound very good.
But my Beloved SP-X9700's really rock the house. I have recapped the cross-overs and had the 4 horn tweeters recoiled and also upgraded the binding post's. There is just something about big 16" paper cone woofers and 8" Mid drivers that I Like with My Pioneer SX-1050. and I would put them up against a set of HPM-100 any day! Properly placed they sound Very large and detailed.
Click to expand...

I recapped my SP-2500 and set them aside for months. Then I pulled them out into rotation a week or so ago only to be amazed. I had them on last night and can say that even a low volume, they are quite impressive and usually an undiscovered speaker. Funny thing is that if you hook them up for 5 minutes, you think, no big deal. Play them for an hour and they are likely to wow you. I did not want to turn them off, but it was late. As far a build quality, probably some of the best I've seen.
 
Interesting. My first real speakers were the SP-5500Xs. Bought new with a 8080db 30+ years ago. I remember them sounding good, but the last time I really listened to them was at least 15 years ago. I sold them for $50. Wished I kept them.
 
I currently have a set of 4 SP-5500's in my rec room. I was extremely fortunate to have found a seller with all four in a quad setup. These are incredible sounding beasts, definitely. The seller had them shipped from overseas back in the 1970's. Each speaker has about 80lbs of lumber with an additional 40lbs of speaker in them. Build quality you won't find today...:tears:
 
It might be mentioned that the SP-5500, unlike the 5500X or any other sansui speaker of the era I've seen images of yet, incorporated a massive, full width of the cabinet horn loaded midrange and this may be responsible for the raves about it?
Unlike so many of Sansui's offerings of the era that had configurations like 4 way, 6 speaker etc it would not have suffered from the imaging difficulties you get from voicing octaves across so many drivers.
I recently scored a minty pair of SP-1200's for $20 at a thrift and started researching these, the 1200 is a 3 way 5 speaker design. They sound okay but lack impact and even within their element (classical, etc) are not impressive. Well built tho and the treated cloth surrounds suggest they may outlast most original owners. A neighbor has a similar larger set, they are 4 or 5 way? Woofer, mids, a little horn mid, tweeters and a super tweeter IIRC? It's damn cloudy if you get right in front, can't pinpoint the material at all. He's proud of them though, so I don't want to make him feel bad and have him over to hear my home brew three ways with huge JBL gold tweeters, Focal mids, and Veritas woofers. All surplus I threw together with infinity crossovers and damn the luck if it didn't work out great.
I'll have to hide those when I sell the SP-1200's on CL, prospective buyers will ask me to switch the speaker selector. Umm, we don't want to disillusion our dream for vintage now do we?
The SP-5500's look interesting tho- ever since I tried horns in a car setup-good sized ones, that extended down to around 400hz- not just tweets- I love horns. The way the detail jumps out at you and the imaging they are thus capable of is amazing. In the car I was able to give them their own channel with adjustable crossover to the above and below band drivers, using an a/d/s 8 channel amp. I would guess Sansui's engineers got them to work with the others well, since their response is so much more sensitive it can be a bear.
 
I bought a set of SP-5000's from a fellow AK member and have been very happy with them (replaced my Polk 10's as my main set). Now to score some 5500's.
 
Most of the old Sansui speakers were designed to have at the most 1 percent distortion, it was never advertised, but if you look at the service/parts sheet there is a chart for frequency response and distortion vs frequency
 
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