There's a pair around here for $40. How do they sound? Guessing there's not going to be much bass output from such a small woofer?
I have had 2 pairs of HD5's posted for sale for a year or more @ $30 with good foam and I marked them down to $25 a few months ago and still nobody is interested, today I got an offer of $20 for a set and I'll be selling them if they show up. Also have 2 sets of the A40's with new foam for $40 and they've been posted over a year with not 1 person interested, also have a center channel and a random single surround. Never cared for any of them, honestly they sound awful and I'm loosing money on them since I paid $25 or $30 for each pair at a goodwill. I quit shopping at goodwill years ago. I have to laugh when I think back to all the banged up and broken garbage they had way overpriced, even in perfect condition there was no way they would sell for the prices they wanted.
Typically one tweeter was blown and they needed surrounds and one grill would be missing and i would search the store and ask them to check in back and never found the match, cabinets were always beat up like they fell down 2 flights of stairs. Then finding foam that fit becomes a problem simply because the speakers and foam will cost more than they could ever sell for and the speakers always are typical old cone woofers and cheap plastic tweeters or paper tweeters with tears in them. My tests of bookshelf speakers like these always showed similar plots, low end JBLs, all but the TOTL infinitys, all polks, pioneer, Onkyo, Panasonic, TEAC, Techniques, Fisher, Radio Shack, Optimus, Realistic, Cerwin Vega, Bose (with paper tweeters were an exception) all had huge dips in plots up till 90Hz and erratic mids, then at 8kHz a huge spike till 10KHz then nothing after that. I tested over 50 bookshelfs and it was same every time when they had dome tweeters and up to 6.5" woofers made up of anything from paper to fiberglass but most used plastic cones. I was surprised to see a Bose interaudio had the flattest plot of them all. Still sounded terrible but it could reproduce the signal in the correct range just had terrible timbre and hollow lifeless mids and none had anything I'd call bass.
Needless to say I'd never consider a bookshelf unless you consider a Heresy sized cabinet a bookshelf (which I certainly wouldn't). Adding a sub never sounds right and that's really a bandaid used by AV surround guys who think every system sounds better with a completely overdone un balanced timbre mismatched sonic boom with one note bass that's running at 100% distortion. They have no concern of ever trying to reproduce anything accurately but the main emphasis is always on how loud the explosions are, to me, it's an instant headache and time to leave when I hear the subs kick in. Couldn't even stand using my matched Mirage BP150iB because it wouldn't even go low enough to match the front speaker output and when it turned on it was overbearing and sounded like a subwoofer always does. The crossover didn't even go low enough to blend properly on top of the volume not going low enough. Never understood what they were thinking when they made subs.
Definitely not created to fill in the missing lowest octaves and just made to go loud and screw up the overall sound when not watching a headache movie. That sub still sits unused after 30 years. Of course it no longer turns on, quality stuff, sold off all av surround parts 20 years ago and don't miss the 100 foot runs of wires everywhere just to have terribly fatiguing noise in my living room. Once it hit 13 speakers, I thought it was a joke and I'm positive the manufacturers were testing to see who was gulable enough to start putting a 13 speaker av system in their living room. It had to be an ongoing joke at that point, expecting the trend to die off quickly and tried to quickly dump off as much of their cheaply made speakers and awful sounding subs before they're stuck with them like I am with stacks of bookshelf's that I'll probably end up tossing in the garbage.
Honestly can't see how people think a Boston HD5 sounds good, it just shows the limited exposure to good sounding speakers, once you hear what's possible, things like HD5s will never be connected for longer than it takes to test them to see if they work so you know how to price them for sale.
Just my 2 cents on cheap bookshelf speakers that use plastic drivers, oh yeah, nobody remembered to tell everyone that they need to recap them all to "open" the sound up, that always gives me a good laugh. Spending $100 and time to recap a speaker that will never sound good unless it's replaced by another speaker that isn't made of plastic. Although there are exceptions to everything, Energy speakers were made entirely from plastic except for the magnet and coils and tinsel leads and they made a halfway decent sounding true bookshelf but they suffered early death because of that design is unable to resist gravities pull on the magnets mounted to cheap cast plastic frames. They tried to correct them with straps across the magnets but it was too late in the game and they and Mirage became extinct due to bad ideas and early death, Klipsch took the loss and quietly moved on recreating the same speakers they have been making for 70 years and just multiplied the price by 10 and called it a day, it's always smarter to stick with what's lasted the test of time and make tiny adjustments that can fetch huge returns from loyal customers. Never feeling like they're ripping people off in the long run.
That's the new audio market, say that it's better, find reasons to bash old speakers in forums and produce new tests that have no meaning or use for the typical audio nut, as long as it's something that was never an issue but they can show how much better new speakers are when it comes to "off axis response", something that I thought only mattered when building a car audio system. Getting the driver's side lower door speaker to project to your left ear was a trick that was only accomplished through the lies of off axis response. That carried on to home speakers as a way to convince people to not listen to electrostatic speakers knowing if everyone did, they'd be as pissed off as I was after being told how good my cone driver box speakers sound and then the realization sets in once you have a set of electrostatics in your livingroom and find out exactly just how awful you're set of $2k surround speakers sound and how terrible the sub mixes with them. Plus the amps they used in most subs would die right after warranty ended. After I heard electristics I quit buying anything but electrostatics.
None of the stories told in forums are true, most lies are spread by those who have never even heard an electrostatic speaker let alone owned them or ever had to fix them, as we all know how they're constantly broken and need repair. That's why you still can find JansZen panels made in the 1950s still working perfectly, of course after 50 years the transformer wires need to be resoldered on to the transformer leads and the ceramic resistors will be out of spec, caps are typically fine but are so cheap that it's smart to replace them. After that, you can run hundreds of watts to them without a crossover and you'll still have a hard time hurting them. Once fixed they last another 30 or 40 years. That's what speaker makers don't want you to know, they spread lies and try to fool you into believing their lies while blaming the electrostatic companies of lying to you, hoping you'll just forget about checking them out. They know you'll be pissed when you hear how music can sound and the price for good used models will cost under $1k and theres plenty of them out there for under $500. With patience you can find them for $300 or less, you must react quickly when you see them priced super cheap, wives pressure men to downsize everything in the house to minimize the man's existence and the wife doesn't care about the loss in selling, it's happening more and more with Martin Logans right now.
That ends my common sense talk for this week, never trust what sounds like bullsh1t in these forums, everyone's here trying to spread a narrative that will make them money in some way, even big companies are here using people as trolls to start the next big issue that proves old speakers can't do a certain thing that nobody cared about for the last 120 years until their sales are falling off and they find a way to make direct comparisons with 10 year old models telling you how much better they image and have huge sound stages, but once you hear electrostatics you'll finally hear what a soundstage really can sound like and the imaging is like nothing but the best headphones. You'll quickly realize that you've been snowed over you're entire life buying crap that has minimal research and development, they're all just buying speakers off the shelf and making a cheap cabinet, mostly by luck they'll make a decent sounding speaker but it will come at a cost since they always create tiers. That way they can justify the cost of the good ones. It would be smarter to just sell the good ones and not bother wasting time selling junk that they just tossed together to fill in the price points.
Good luck with $20 speakers, I wouldn't even consider they could ever do anything properly no matter how they're positioned and what amps are driving them since it's unlikely people are using a quality amp when they're jazzed over scoring a $20 GW speaker that they're comparing to the last $20 GW speakers of the past. The difference between an amp that has 1000 damping factor and the typical receiver with 8 to 40 damping factor (at 1kHz and 2 at 20Hz through 100Hz). The control over the driver's reveals a completely different sound that is free of woofer bottoming out even when driven with power that's 3 times the rated power, while the cheap receiver will make your speakers pop and snap constantly at lower volumes. I would consider a good amp before buying any speakers since you'll never realize their potential without it. That doesn't include any Chinese D amps that some sites are pushing on you, yes it's all BS , the ratings are done so the faults are never revealed and you find out a year later that they've found a cure for problems you never knew existed, because theyr tests won't uncover the known issues like how the amps perfectly flat output is affected by uneven resistance in speakers, how many speakers are made with perfectly flat 8 ohm loads and never go higher or lower as the frequency changes and how many have no phase issues, if you know of these models please post them since they're unicorns that everyone would love to own. You can test anything and change opinions based on how you run tests by avoiding the obvious show stopping issues, you can make claims like "sinad" ratings that are completely based in digital silence since digital silence is a thing that's turned on when the amp is not producing any signal, essentially like you turn off the output to the soeakers. But once music is played the amps background noise is masked behind the sound. The difference between -100 and -135 db is no different since you can't hear either one. So once again basing tests on things you can't hear is not proving anything when the amps ability to play complex analog signals is completely changed , of course playing a digital tone into a fixed resistor will never show the problems and what good is a test that won't show what the amps do in real world situations? Think the tests will change as soon as the fix is applied? Sure, but they won't apologize for deceiving you for 15 years.
Never believe things that don't seem right, like how a tiny amp will put out 400wpc and never gets hot, but uses a PSU that's 3 times the size of the tiny amp that has limited inputs and the analog inputs are never part of the overall rating.since they can't digitally silence the analog inputs. They all leave out the fact that the amps use DA to AD and back to use equalizers and they sound is stipped during that process just like any DSP unit will do , but you'll never hear it with those $20 speakers anyway so go get a miniDSP for $800 and run it through your tiny hot Chinese amp that doubles as a furnace unless you put a noisy fan on it and there goes you're sinad right out the window! I forgot to mention that those amps require upgraded PSUs to even come close to their claims but can only produce that power for a split second and if they're driven for any length of time they steadily lose power till they overheat or they end up putting out only a fraction of claimed after as little as 5 seconds. Their are others that run tests that reveal all the D issues and lies are uncovered. The other fact that's never mentioned is how D amps are capped to not play lower than a set frequency (most are ok to 20Hz} but none can play over 20kHz or they'll end up oscillating and self destruct, that offers little good when you're speakers (like sony, I forgot to add them to my list, who claimed to make their speakers play up to 30KHz and I tested the same 8KHz to 10KHz spike and then nothing after that) claim to go up to 30kHz, even though nobody can hear past 20kHz but the reality is most can't hear past 15kHz, doesn't make much sense to create a tweeter that plays that high in the first place but they didn't even do it so it makes no difference and I top of it Sony ES amos are capped at 20kHz so how could they even know they can play to 30kHz unless they tested their junk with an adcom or a NAD AB class amp?
I felt like it's time to let people know what happens in these forums is not happening by chance and discussions that include recapping are just trolls working for their own gain. Bob Critea was a main player here with his recapping BS and his business was built on BS passed through this site. Amire does the same but it's his site so that a bit different it's disguised as testing but as I said he tests things differently according to the class. That's how you can have a tiny Chinese amp at the top of the list and they can charge way more than you'd pay for a real tried and proven powerhouse that will last decades when a chinese amp might make it to the end of the warranty if all goes well and you are t expecting to get the most out of it, guarantee to fail if you try to hit the max outputs they post while running a 2 second test using a pure tone and a fixed resistor and never concentrate on the digital to analog loss that occurs in every digital device.
Time to get a $10k DAC and a $10k clock sync controller, weird how they used to be able to do this with a phone that costs $50 and now you need separate components base solely on each process?
). 
