Yes, they are discontinued now.
Yes, they are a Best Buy store brand.
However, these are VERY good little speakers, very open very musical, very neutral, and no rough edges or grit at all!
Somebody donated a couple of Denon receivers and these speakers for a local church garage sale that Mary, my assistant is involved with. She dumped the whole bunch off onto me to see if anything of these worked. I got one of the Denon receivers to work after cleaning a bunch of oxidized switches. Yeah, it works, and makes 100W/Ch, but sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. The other Denon receiver, a big 5 channel surround sound unit, was simply dead, and stayed dead even after I located and replaced one of five internal fuses I found buried inside.
Oh well, might as well check out the speakers. First step ohm them out to make sure I was not connecting a working power amp to a dead shorted speaker voice coil. Test passed. Next did the gentle push test on the woofer cones to make sure they were not scraping. They passed this test too.
So, just for the hell of it I hooked them up to our Insight+ SL solid state preamp and Insight+ 170 solid state power amp built in a Dyna ST-120 chassis.
Wholly cow! These are really really good little speakers - certainly better then the Pioneer SP-BS22s that I reported on herein a year ago and has had a continuous thread here ever since.
The obvious main difference between these and the Pioneers is the complete lack of high frequency roughness. The highs are rolled off a bit but that is much more tolerable then a rough harsh top end. These are low coloration, open, limited bass of course but good definition on what they do play.
I priced this used set at $50 for the pair for Mary for the church sale, which was more then she had expected, but then, before she ran off with them I bought them myself.
By the way these are pretty unique in having a true coaxial speaker design. A 6.5" woofer with 0.4" dome tweeter built right into the middle of it where the dust cap would usually be. This provides for a very coherent sound field.
These are very worth while considering if you can find a nice used pair.
The sad thing is that if these speakers were previously used with the Denon receiver I repaired, the user never would have known how good these speakers are.
Frank Van Alstine
