Pioneer Hpm-60

I have 4 Pioneer HPM-60 speakers……?

…should I spend money repairing them, or just get new speakers?
I was given 4 Pioneer HPM-60 speakers. They’re in pretty good shape, and in use right now in my home theater, but some of the pieces need replaced (Woofers, tweeters, etc). Since they haven’t been produced in 30 years, I’d have to do some searching to find good replacement parts, and they may be pricey. But I’ve been reading online that the HPM line of speakers are really great quality, and that they’re still really popular because they sound so good.

So, what’s your opinion… should I invest the time and money to buy replacement parts and stick with the high quality vintage, or should I see what I could get for the speakers at sale and invest in some newer ones?

I’ve done this three times, once with a pair of EPI A100s, once with a pair of EPI 500s, and once with a pair of AR-4as that haven’t been made since the 1970s. I still use all of them, and they still sound superb. In each case, the problem was foam rot around the bass drivers. For the EPIs, I got re-coned factory drivers. The ARs were too old, but I refitted them with Genesis drivers and new crossovers, and they sound great. Those speakers, incidentally, were my dad’s, and he bought them in the late 1960s.

This company (I think it’s just one guy working out of his garage) sells replacement drivers for vintage speakers: http://www.humanspeakers.com/, and also builds custom speakers. If he does not have the drivers your speakers were originally built with, the odds are good that he can find some that sound just as good or better. Much of what goes into making a good speaker is cabinet design, and if the cabinets are still good, they should sound good with replacement drivers. He’ll ship the drivers to you, and refund part of your purchase price when you send the old ones back to him for re-coning.

Why you want to do this: Most speakers these days are bass-reflex design, vented enclosures. This allows for deeper bass with smaller drivers, but a lot of people, including me, don’t like the way they sound because they seem to sour the midrange. The speakers I rebuilt are all acoustic-suspension design, sealed enclosures; less efficient, but the bass is tighter and the overall sound is sweeter. It’s hard to find speakers that sound as good without spending a lot of money, so I think it’s worthwhile to fix up your old boxes.