"Hey, are these Yorx speakers any good?"

[Tom Brennan]

I learned to not make subjective evaluations of a speaker until I hear it. And I'd rather listen to many a cheap, simple speaker than some of the speakers popular around here.

 

[RCherrington]

homebrew - that was why they painted those rings one the baffles - if the grills had come off, the deception would have been instantly obvious. You had to peer through the cloth or punched plastic grills to see that what looked like a driver wasn't, in fact, a driver. And, apparently, for enough people, this realization came only after buying..

As a kid (14 or thereabouts) I bought my first receiver, a Technics SA150. (It took many mowed lawns to get the money together, so don't tell me what a POS it was!!!). I didn't have money for speakers yet, so a friend of my big brother 'gave' me a set of CRAIG two way speakers to get me started.

A couple months of blissful (/s/) music listening - and lawn mowing - go by and I get myself a 'real' pair of speakers with removable grilles that showed off a massive, earth shattering 10" woofer, a 3 or 4" mid and a little tiny tweeter. Technics or Pioneer, IIRC. So me being an inquisitive little brat I took the Graigs apart because I wanted to see what the crossovers looked like.

As it turned out, there was only one speaker, 5 or 5.5 inches with a whizzer cone in the middle, and a silver paper ring around it to make it look like an 8+ inch woofer. The tweeter was nothing but another plastic ring and the "port" for the woofer. The back panels - as you mentioned were 1/8" hard board, though they did have spring loaded terminals on the back. So at least the connectors were "audiophile"!

 

[cgutz]

My wife asked what speaker brands to look for since she frequents garage sales, thrifts, etc.
Giving a list of good brands is an impossible task, so I gave the following advice. It isn't completely reliable, but stopped the phone calls/texts about absolute junk:

"If the speaker seems heavy for its size, and/or has edges more than 1/2" thick on the sides, and/or has removeable grills, and doesn't have RCA speaker terminals, give me a call with the brand name and model number."

It stopped a lot frivolous of calls/texts. On the other hand, it may have caused a miss on some gems, but not real likely.

 

[telejunky]

My Soundesign system owned new from 1975 or so included vinyl covered speakers with little plastic "horns" in the upper front of the baffle. Except there were no horns - nothing in the box but a single 5 or 6 inch wide range speaker. I dragged this to college and the speakers were blown out by numerous dorm parties.

Replaced those speakers with a pair of the flat woofer MCS in about 1981, and got several more years of medium-lo-fi service.