I browse ebay for vintage speakers from time to time so stuff like this shows up in the little suggestion area of the home page. Today i noticed these little triads. The guy on the right wants $50 for two satellites and the guy on the left wants $685. So is that sub worth $635? LOL

I know, I know, this was humor. But....

A crucial point about "worth" on ebay is that you should only look at the selling price for laughs about humanity. If you want to know what something might be worth, look at how much this item has actually sold for in the past.

Besides that, both of those sellers might be idiots. (Of course, so might we.)

Maybe he has some emotional attachment to it.

I had a pair of EV 30W woofers that cost me $80. I seriously doubt I will ever have that kind of bass in a system of my own again but as good as this one may be, it would never get me to think it's better than the EVs, based on price.

But was that bass high fidelity? The proper bass volume considering the rest of the audio spectrum? Did you ever think that perhaps speakers with less bass might be more accurate?

I'm just sayin.'

It wasn't just a whole lot of shakin' goin' on, the extension really was impressive. Deep, smooth- I play bass and it sounded very real.

The Triad System 7 originally retailed for 1000$ about 10 years ago. I like that 10 year old speakers are considered “vintage” in the seller’s eyes.

I have a pair of Jamo J-101 from 1979 and they still sound great. 10 years is nothing- I have an Oahu lap steel guitar amp from about 1937 (it can't be older than that if the tubes were original because one of the tubes was released in 1937, the others came out in 1936. The field coil speaker is original and in good condition.

Not a speck of bass comes out of that amp.

I see "extension" and I don't see "accurate." If a speaker extends the bass, then it does not accurately reproduce it.

It's real, though, that we don't always want high fidelity.

If bass extension is what you want, locate a Phase Coupled Activator on ebay. It's an analog device of the 80s (the manual says 2985, which is Audio Control's sense of humor -- they're the guys who stamp DO NOT SAUTE on their product cartons) that takes all audio below 100 Hz, lowers it by an octave, and runs it back into the audio. Does your instrument go down to 40 Hz? Now it goes down to 20 Hz on the same fret! THAT is bass extension!

By extension, I meant that it produced sound at lower frequencies than I had heard before, from recordings I had owned for years. I meant that the bass extended farther into the low frequencies- does that work for you?

This was over 20 years ago- it was more difficult to get test equipment that could measure speaker output for distortion and accuracy.

I remember that piece- it was made because most people didn't have speakers that could reproduce low frequencies very well. They had a similar piece for car audio, called 'Epicenter' and it was responsible for the deaths of many woofers. I remember the boxes, too- I think they may have mentioned that it's bad to hit their products with chains, too. Did you ever talk to them? It was like going back to the '60s.

I never liked the sound when those were active- it was like the saying about teaching a pig to sing- "It sounds bad and annoys the pig".