Half browsing for speaker stands, spotted as pair of unnamed stands local to me nice and cheap on eBay.

Bit more research and it turns out they’re a pair of Partington Dreadnought stands in great condition.

My winning bid just over £12 😁

They only work in the correct room shape, with infinite baffle speakers and jazz, you do know this?

Srsly good win. So many bargins out there

and jazz

Oh bollocks.. 😉

Turns out they’re not Dreadnought’s but Ansa 60’s in immaculate condition.
Really good quality and make a great improvement on the sound.
Not quite such a bargain but still not bad for £12.48..and What Hi-Fi 5* winners a few years ago.

I have some of the orignal Partington Dreadnoughts, with the single pillar.

I stupidly drilled into one of them from the top to fill them with lead, but they were already filled with lead !

Is this a “hi fi” thing that normal people don’t get? I would’ve thought speaker stands would cost around £20 so £12 second hand sounds about right. Am I a heathen?

Baal worshipper, obvs.

nick: good speaker stands would have cost £1-300 I’g guess originally.

The thin is that they work as well as they ever did and I expect quite a lot of hifi hasn’t progressed hugely the sme price point so there are huge bargains.
Much like a £100 531 road frame on ebay – will be load lighter than £500 Surlys etc and not much heavier than new road frames.

would’ve thought speaker stands would cost around £20

£160 new apparently

I stupidly drilled into one of them from the top to fill them with lead, but they were already filled with lead !

Did the weight not give it away before you started?

Did the weight not give it away before you started?

clearly not – I was young and not used to lifting big chunks of steel around and they are pretty substantial anyway.

I am clueless about hi fi, but need to buy 2 nice speakers and an amp.

I have an amp/record player and 4 speakers in one room, I would like to add 2 speakers in adjoining room – so the amp ideally would have 6 speaker places (my current amp has room for 2 speakers, but I have put extra wires in each one).

It’s for an old cottage, so ideally I would like something plain with no lights/flashing stuff…and ideally the speakers will have a wooden cabinet.

Any pointers on what I should keep an eye out for? Would it be possible to get amp and speakers for £200 ish?

I know I am a heathen. My cables aren’t even directional. Whatever that means…

Is this a “hi fi” thing that normal people don’t get? I would’ve thought speaker stands would cost around £20 so £12 second hand sounds about right. Am I a heathen?

A speaker works best when it’s placed on something really solid that won’t vibrate or transmit vibrations through it. Bookshelf speakers need to be sat on something to isolate them, like squash balls cut in two, or blobs of blutak, speakers on stands should have blutak under each corner, not only isolates them, it makes them almost impossible to knock off the stands.
I’ve got a pair of original Foundation Audio stands, really heavy steel construction, hollow rectangular column with square plates top and bottom, the upright filled with a mixture of fine sand and small lead shot, with spikes on the bottom to fix them into the floorboards through the carpet. They cost quite a lot, but I did get 30% staff discount from the hifi shop I worked in on Saturdays.
I can promise you this, accidentally kicking a corner of the bottom plate with no shoes on is likely to result in a bout of weeping quietly in a corner… 😱😫🤬

I have an amp/record player and 4 speakers in one room, I would like to add 2 speakers in adjoining room – so the amp ideally would have 6 speaker places (my current amp has room for 2 speakers, but I have put extra wires in each one).

You shouldnt do that. It (approximately) halves the impedance amongst other problems.

What you end up with is the amp doing twice as much work as it was designed to. A 100w amp plugged into a 200w speaker only produces 100w of power, a 100w amp plugged into two 100w speakers in parallel produces 200w, which if cant so it goes pop (or distorts horribly).

If you get 4x pairs of speakers you can Daisy chain them (wire them as a 2×2 grid with two in series and two in parallel) and it’ll work, but it always has to be a square number (1, 4, 9, 16 pairs), and the speakers should be identical.

You would be better off buying a propper multi room amp, or a distribution amplifier (which takes one line level input from your pre-amp and splits it into as many outputs as you need) and putting separate amps in each room.

^^^ what they said.

Would it be possible to get amp and speakers for £200 ish?

Not unless you go Gumtree. A Yamaha AS301 is as unfussy as they come, silver would look nice. Supports two sets of speakers. Costs nearly your whole budget though. For speakers RicherSounds £100 mark would be where I’d look, like the SX50/60s.

Thanks both.

That AS301 looks great, I guess I could just have two speakers in each room, after reading TINAS comments, it seems it won’t sound any worse than what I have now.