Sansui Speakers

Brusco

I see the Sansui receivers are praised but not too much is said about their speakers. Does anyone have Sansui speakers in their systems? Which models? opinions in general?

motorstereo

For me Sansui speakers serve as my reference point on how bad sounding a speaker can be and are to be avoided. Their only redeeming qualities are the cabinets are well made. Their electronics though are a different story. I have a couple of their vintage pieces (au9500+au11000) which sound excellent and I'll never part with.

cnh

That period was pretty much the AR, KLH, Advent, etc. era of speakers. Most Japanese receivers were usually paired with American made speakers of that time. Sansui speakers? I have some Realistic Novas that would be a better pairing with my 5000A or AU-517.

cnh

mhardy6647

Sansui, like most of the Japanese massmarket hifi brands of the 1960s and 1970s, was "inspired" for the US market, by JBL for all of the wrong reasons. Sansui generally put too big of a woofer in too small of a box and augmented it with admixtures of numerous poorly integrated horn and cone midwoofers, midranges, subtweeters, tweeters and supertweeters. The term "boom box" has a very specific meaning in speaker design parlance; many of the Sansui speakers were designed using in essence a boom box alignment.

The term "Kabuki Speaker" has evolved to describe this form trumps function class of loudspeaker design.

Having said that... interestingly, even the massmarket hifi brands understood good loudspeaker design and most of them, over the years, made some extremely good loudspeakers. They just didn't bother to export them to the US. There were probably several reasons for this - not the least of which was the expense of shipping a large, heavy box that, when it's all said and done, is mostly empty space! Indeed, as energy costs soared, many if not most of the big Japanese names began building their loudspeakers in the US - the Pioneer "Project Series", for example.

If you want to see the best - and worst - of Sansui loudspeakers of that era, peruse http://www.audio-heritage.jp/SANSUI/speaker/index.html

Here are some great awful examples of US-marketed Sansui speakers courtesy of the Wayback Machine from the late, great www.classic-sansui.net site.

Mystery

Except one or two exception, all Sansui speakers are crap.
However, they may be better than Fisher STV series. :eek:

mhardy6647

The incredibly modest little Sansui SP-30 two-way is a very respectable-sounding speaker. Honest. Would I kid youse guyses?

http://www.audio-heritage.jp/SANSUI/speaker/sp-30.html

These US-made Pioneer Project 100A speakers, despite their goofy configuration (cone tweeter and dome MR) are almost surprisingly respectable.

indyhawg

I bought some SP 3000's out of a thrift shop a few years back. They stayed in my house for less than a month. I really did not care for them at all.

skrol

One of my fondest memories is my friend's trailer home where he had a Sansui x00 watt receiver and a pair of Sansui big-A** woofer speakers. We were watching Total Recall on laser disk while enjoying a few beers. When the dome blew the entire trailer shook then the lights went out until we fumbled to find the breaker box.

drumminman

A buddy of mine had a pair of Sansui speakers when we were in college. Beautiful cabinets, interesting wood lattice grills, but sound wise completely uninteresting. They were totally outclassed by first my large Advents, and later ADS L-700's.

Mr. Bubbles

This makes me think of when I first started getting into vintage audio gear. I had a combination of marantz and other gear as a teenager that i had got from local pawn shops. I had just gotten most of my original gear back from my sister after many many years and it got me to looking at other vintage gear on the net. I fell in love with the looks of the Pioneer Sa-706 with it's matching tuner. i have always been a sucker for VU meters. this got me to looking at some of their early speakers. i found a pair of CS-77. They were beautiful and simple enough to sound good (so i thought as they did not have 10+ drivers per cabinet) I drove 2 hours round trip to get them and so very excitedly carried them in and hooked them up. man was i disappointed. Even compared to the Advent 2's I had been using. They definitely sounded nothing like my HPM 700's i had as a teenager. beautiful cabinets but the design was still the same many driver/ pretty cabinet mentality and sonically they suffered greatly. One of my biggest audio disappointments.

boston1450

skrol wrote: »

One of my fondest memories is my friend's trailer home where he had a Sansui x00 watt receiver and a pair of Sansui big-A** woofer speakers. We were watching Total Recall on laser disk while enjoying a few beers. When the dome blew the entire trailer shook then the lights went out until we fumbled to find the breaker box.

that there is funny

George Grand

A complete horror story. There is a tin-eared following for those Sansui and Pioneer lattice-cabinet speakers. I had a brand-new looking pair of Sansui SP2000 just a couple years back, in the brand new looking Sansui boxes they came in. I couldn't sell those clunkers for $50/pair, and tried for at least a year or two. I finally gave them away just to get rid of them.

bondslex

Good job.

Brusco

I have a pair of Sansui S-47's. My guess is that they are from the 80's since they are kind of styled that way. White woofers and the visers on the tweeter. What's up with that? They sound ok but the woofers need a refoam. Probably not worth the 25 bucks? I have no pics of them but found an image of another similar pair from the same era. Do you think they improved at all by this time or do they still use Boom box proportions?

mhardy6647

The plastic "vanes" over the oh-so-generic cone tweeters are meant to evoke some of the fine JBL (and other) compression drivers that used horns equipped with such vanes to enhance dispersion. That's all they do, in the Sansui's case (i.e., they imitate precision loudspeaker design).

No, they're not really worth any effort, as you surmise.

Mystery

Brusco wrote: »

Probably not worth the 25 bucks?

Try generic foam for less than $10 in the bay.
Probably worth that much for place like garage for background music.

mhardy6647

Well... I guess it depends on how much one values one's time. I actually had a pair of dump-find Sansuis similar to that. Pitched the drivers quickly as they were truly awful and used the cabinets for some full-range driver experiments with the Radio Shack 40-1197 (Fostex FE-103) 4" drivers (and some plywood baffles to fill in the unused holes)...

Are you sure the surrounds are foam and not treated cloth? On the ones that passed through here, the woofer surrounds were not foam. Just sayin'...

Brusco

They are definitely foam and showing a lot of deterioration. My speakers have the white aged woofers. I think I will refoam them. $25 is worth it. Here they are.

Brusco

I bought a refoam kit from Simply Speakers and refoamed them. I hooked them up to a Pioneer SX-525 receiver and now I have decent sounding setup in my basement. I think they sound much better with the tweeter visors off. Easily worth the $25 and some extra work to refoam.

Mystery

If you are happy with the sound, that's all it matters.
Glad you saved a pair.

ken brydson

5 year old necropost spammer reported

mhardy6647

necropost spammer would make a good name for some sort of thrash-Goth-deathmetal band thingy.

pkquat

This was a fun vintage read though. The variations on number of drivers and combinations of them is interesting. It makes me wonder what the crossovers looked like. Graphic equalizers were made for these speakers and created some interesting patterns vs. the standard smile.

The J11's look interesting. If the speakers were crap, I wonder if they could be re-purposed with different drivers. Guessing at the cabinet thickness of the Polk mini monitors, I'd guess these followed a similar formula for internal volume.

What the J11's really remind me of though are a set of mini system speakers with maybe 3" or 3.5" drivers (they could have been 4" but that seems too big) that sounded phenomenal for such a little speaker. I think they were AKAI. They had a similar look to the J11, white woofers and a similar fabric dome tweeter with a silver or aluminum cabinet. They were super deep, and had a long throw woofer instead of a PR. I think there was some type of port at the back. It might have been an transmission line, horn, or Bose type tuned port tuned very deep. Up close they were very rich and gave some bass feel to the senses. They would not fill a room with bass, but at moderate volumes were surprisingly deep, much more so than my 4As. I dreamed of them as PC speakers. They were about as deep or deeper than a CRT, but as I recall not shielded and WAY more than I could afford at the time.

Viking64

mhardy6647 wrote: »

necropost spammer would make a good name for some sort of thrash-Goth-deathmetal band thingy.

With an umlaut over at least one "o" and "spammer" being pronounced as "shpommer".

[Deleted User]

Japanese speakers that I'd heard from that era were universally awful and I've never considered them since. It's like trying a skunky beer, or a girl who develops a sore on her lip. You never go back for seconds.

mhardy6647

there were some good ones, but they rarely made it to the US.

recoveryone

My Dad brought a full setup from turntable to speakers from England back in 1965/66. The speakers looked similar to the SP V100's. I held on to the speakers until 1999, I had them rebuilt over the years with better tweeters and mid's when I was in college (great party speakers). I replaced one woofer, but the cabinets were bullet proof.

pongshi

Kabuki or not, I passed a pair of SP-3500 speakers to my son that he has hooked up to Sansui G8000. We have wood laminate flooring in his room and the speakers are placed very close to wall. He runs vinyl, mostly classic rock, and it sounds terrific. Obviously these are not high end speakers, but they are not white van speakers either. I have offered him a pair of Klipsch KG4s and my polk monitor 10s, but he still likes the Sansuis. I don't think the Sansui SP-3500 sound nearly as good as the polks or Klipsch, but they are still respectable, at least in his room. I don't know much about other Sansui speakers, but these are not bad.

motorstereo

Re-reading my comment from 2013 I mentioned I would "never part with" my 2 sansui integrateds (au9500 and au11000). My how things change in this hobby. I should learn to never say never as both of those integrateds are gone now as is my modded tu9900 tuner.
But I believe I'm safe in saying I won't be bringing home any sui speakers ever again though

codycatalist

motorstereo wrote: »

.Apparently I need to never say never in this hobby.

You should add that to the audio nuggets thread!

mhardy6647

ewww.