Bought these at a yard sale some kid was having when he inherited his grandmothers house. $5 well spent. They are not miracle workers but do sound fairly well hooked up to my Onkyo tsxr508. They will be used on a Sony 502kp as mains but tested them on the better performing Onkyo. Fair low end and mids. The highs are a bit "shrill" . That said for a pair of 40 something year old speakers they work great!

Craigslist score. Picked up a pair of the 1500 and a pair of Pioneer CS77A for the grand total of $30.00! I'm getting the Pioneer tweeters refoamed ($30+ shipping) so will do a better head to head comparison, but as of now the Sansui sound richer and fuller. Great mellow sounding and once I sand and Watco Oil them I'll be a happy camper.

beauty, nice wood for mellowness, very clear mid-range. very sensitive- >=93db.
with good tube amp would sound wonderful.

preconceived notions; weight- but if i figure cost per pound? a cadilac costs more than a buick - why? basically it weighs more!

first i will say that after a lot of comparative shopping 20 years ago i bought a pair of advent 8006 speakers that i loved. i would take those over any kef, b&w, thiel. i had to sell those when out of work for a long time. while cheap is cheap price alone does not indicate quality. buy a jolida jd1701 you will see. anyway, i got an old marantz and a pair of klipsch sf-1 speakers. the system was nice. i got a pair of kef c75s and those were a little better than the klipsch. you see, like listening to music and i have been putting together a nice system again on a budget. well, i have a pair of sansui sp30 speakers in my office connected to an old, small pioneer receiver. that has always sounded very nice in the back ground. the speakers are beautiful with the wood cabinets and lattice work in front. people have made numerous positive comments. a couple have wanted to buy the system. well, i decided i would like to find a nice set of larger sansuis with the beautiful woodwork. finally i did - at a flea market i found a pair of sp-1500s. they looked good. i took a chance. i cleaned them up, polished them, touched up a few places, oiled them. they look beautiful. i got some high qaulity speaker wire. i hooked them up. i adjusted the treble, mid, and bass controls on the marantz. i played the speakers a few time without listening too critically - i wanted to let the dust get blown off, etc. luckily there are no problems with any of the internals.
the sound? i think they sound much better than the kefs or the klipsch. i think they sound very mellow. that is what i like though. i do not like booming bass. i find that when the bass is there in the source material, i.e. material that does have strong bass passages the speakers do reach down there and get it. the midrange is great- listening to james taylor, nora jones, or paul simon is really nice. i set the midrange to natural on the back of the speakers. i set the high freq to clear. i get nice, clear highs. the solid cabinets with furniture grade plywood and real wood veneer adds to the beautuy of the sound. think of an antique violin. or guitar. wood matters. these are mellow and clear. and, these look beautiful along with my beautiful furniture. sansui did make some inexpensive stuff. but they made some nice stuff too. they made a couple of real nice turntables. they made some nice speakers. a couple of their old tuners are sought after and considered the best. i can tell you after listening to some clean vinyl on an old sony turntable with a pro quality shure cartridge and needle through my marantz and these sansui speakers i can walk into the store selling rotel and b&w and tell right away the precise, clinical sound is not for me. i love that mellow, natural sound. get a pair of these if for no other reason than to refinish the cabinets just for looks. if you are lucky enough to get some without internal damage you will listen for a while and begin to appreciate what that wood introduces to the sound quality. the speakers were built with cloth surrounds and made to never rot. at least appreciate the build quality. almost as nice as the old advents i once had.

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kef c75, klipsch sf-1.

Very good sound quality for the low price

It sometimes distorts when the volume is up full blast and I mean FULL BLAST

I have had about 12 other speaker sets in the cinema room but these are the best speakers that I have ever had. The sound quality is the same if not better than my fathers $5,000 Yamaha sound system. I just went to lifeline one day and then there they were. I took them home straight away and connected them up to my stereo by themselves and i was very suprised at the sound quality. I can't believe that i picked them up for $5.00 Each. My friend Troy recently purchased a $500 Sony stereo system and I am sure that the sound quality of my stereo is better than the quality of his brand new speakers. one main differences is that his stereo has an anti distortion system and mine doesn't, yet the speakers still don't distort very easily. If anyone found them for sale anywhere then i would highly reccommend that you pick them up, you will be very suprised with the quality.

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GE (General Electronics) 5 CD Courasel Surround Sound System.

Very smooth sound when set up with a test CD and good EQ.
Beautiful walnut veneer cases with hand-carved Kumiko grill.

Very heavy.

I bought these in Okinawa in 1970 for $66 each. I have auditioned countless speakers since, and always came back to these beautiful-sounding Sansui's. I had a dealer offer me a $1,000 trade-in for the pair about 5 years ago. I auditioned everything in his demo room and refused the offer.

Two months ago I invested heavily in a new home theater setup and had to get rid of the Sansui's. They wouldn't fit and are not magnetically shielded. What I have now (Energy Take 5) is vastly inferior. Oh well...

But the 1500's are still creating joy...I gave them to my son. He and his family love them. If you can ever get a set, don't pass them up.

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None that compare.

This is one hell of a heavy speaker system to lift. It is challenging to carry this thing up a multi floor flight of stairs. I bought just one (all he had) from a co-worker at a place where I was working in '94 and ended up with an old capacitor coupled output matched output transistor, Sansui AU777 35W/35W (@8 ohm) amplifier, an auxilliary Sansui power Amp (35W/35W @8ohm and wonderful old circular analog face Sansui matching tuner with it. All this was $80.00 All was in excellent plus condition and made in 1966 and was brought over by the guy's father when he reterned from the service in Viet-Nam. I did check everything out and find it to all be working but there was only one speaker so I just store all the stuff for 5 years and didn't think about it much. I familiar with teh stuff because it was the first all solid state line of equipment that the place where I had worked in the '60's while attending U of H in Houston. I remeber that the amplifiers had always tested very well for cheap bottom end Audio equipment. So, you see it was more of a nostalgia thing than really wanting the stuff to be a part of my main sound system. (#1 Sys: K-horns, #2 Sys: Altec A-7's, and many other rigs too nymerous to mention here). Those are all down at my farm in east Texas.
Recently I came to Dallas to do some contract work and while sort of "camping-out" (I call it that) in small temporary quarters near the job sight I finally became more and more "hungry for some sound". One Sat. I was driving nearby and happened onto a "yard-sale" where some young students lived and one of them had a reall small pair of Sansui book shelf speakers with the same exact cabinets and wood fret-work grills as the SP-1500 I had bought some time earlier. They were very nicely made and finished and had a 6 1/2 in. low frequency driver and tiney horn tweeter with 3/4 inch driver. The kid said his grandfather had brought them back from Vietnam. (Sound familiar?).So, $15.00 later I owned those as well. Soon it was time to go abck down to the Farm for a quiet weekend and I dug out the old Sansui stuff listed earlier and took 'em back to the big city. The 777 amp has a pair of mono preamp outputs; One is full range and the other is 150HZ on down only (sub-woofer country) with the main volume control in the circuit. So....first I hooked up the little Sansui 'wing' speakers. Ugh! they play pretty loud but the high high end sounded like it has been attenuated or the tweeters are not efficient enough to match the woofer. Plus ther was this pretty fat peak down around 100-150 HZ. So needing a project anyway, I opened the littel Sansui's and found some extremely old technology Alnico V magnet stamped frame speakers. I took the woofer out and looked at it and it has a rally nicely made thicker and stiffer than average cone material and the really tiny little horn tweeter was running off of a 4 MFD paper/oil high-pass capacitor. There was also some brownish magnet wire wrapped around the perimeter of the body of the tweeter. Actually it was two coils of wire. One coil was in series and the other was in parallel. But since these were wound out away from the metal body of the horn they would have to be considered air core not metal or iron core. That told me that they were not trying for any real inductance hear. (besides A series inductor is a low-pass device and that is not what they were trying to achieve here. A quick check with the VOM with the leads desoldered showed that they were actually about 5 ohms in series and about the same in parallel. Then it dawned on me.....they have designed a cheap and dirty fixed L-pad using voice coil wire (I am sure they had plenty of that lying around the factory). So I did not resolder these leads and left them out off teh circuit. OK, no L-Pad. I hooked them up again and ......hello we have got very nice high-end now, but the limited low end still booms. So, I re-opend the little boxes again and notice thier little 'Helmholtz" resonator like thingy and decided that this was long before Msrs. Thiele and Small had shown us the 'light' on speaker design, so, I thought maybe I would make T/S measurements and modify the rig a proper port using PerfectBox or one of the other design utilities. Then I thought...well, if this is going to be just a pair of 'wing' speakers for sterophonic imaging to go along with the big and beefy SP1500 maybe we don't want any real extended low end for now. SO... I took some small pieces of plywood plugged the port and sealed the boxed and caulked some slight air leaks and then stuffed it full of fiberglass. Then I listened to them by themselves again. Aha...no peak, and the low end is very limited to 150-160HZ region and then falls off smoothly below that as you would expect in a sealed box design. Ok, hooked up all this stuff and set the Sansui SP1500 level switches for the tweeters (2 1 inchers) and the 2, (3.5 inch), mid ranges to the normal postiion and slipped on a CD of a really ratty sounding little jazz band from the Preservation Hall recorded 'live' by Sony in '92 in New Orleans. I sat back planning to be mildly amused by all this very old and ancient 'trailing edge technology gear.

Suddenly with a loud trumpet peal this little rig came alive. What a hot sounding little 'Kick-Ass' system!. A major surprise. The mono center channel is one side of 35W/35W auxiliary power amp and the two wing speakers are running off on channel of the AU777 integrated amp. Amazing! what a joy to have such an unexpected success. A very dynamic 'hard' and 'punchy' sounding rig for this really small room I am stuck with for now. What a hot sounding rig for under $100.00. Who would have thought it? The SP1500 has a 12 inch Alnico V woofer with a helmholtz resonator with low-end falling like a stone at 45-50HZ. The most interesting thing about the rig is the really nice large image size on orchestral things that were not recorded as muti-channel mono like so many early (and even many recent) rock recordings are. On the more commercial pop and rock recordings there seems to be a little too much center channel going on, but then when you kill the smaller flanking speakers it is obvious they are really still doing at least 50-60% of what is going on.
These things change character pretty radically from recording to recording.
Escpecially on old analog stuff.

If any of you pickey audiophiles out there ever run across Sansui speakers from this era you might pick them up cheaply on a gsrage sale lark and set up a little back bedroom rig and have some real fun wondering how the crafty Japanese engineers of 1965-66 did so well in the pre computer, and pre Theile/Small days with a system design that was surprisingly ahead of its time with a quality of materials that is some what better than average. I can still remember turning my nose up at the name Sansui in the old days. We thought it was just cheap stuff to sell to the pedestrian users and I suppose it was intended for a segment of that market.

My point here, is that I see evidence of this older Japansese manufacturer going quite a bit farther than they had to go (to capture that segment of the american market).

They last, and last, and last...

They have lasted so long, they are starting to die a bit

These speakers were my mother's when she went to college, and now they have found their way into my basement room where i listen to music from various sources, watch TV, and just dink around with them all the time. These things have had their problems, but they have all been minor and easy for a home user to fix (loose wires, older type speaker connections on the inside that a little solder can fix, that sort of thing). These things do not have the best sound in them that I have ever heard, but for their age... They're pretty decent. Not great, and not bad. I've heard worse stuff on the market today, let's say that.

If you find a pair of these for cheap, pick em up. You can not find driver replacements for most of these speakers, so make sure they work. For example, I can no get mine repaired because the sizes are odd. The midrange on both of my speakers are ripped all the around, so a lot of sound quality is lost there. Other than that, these things live on.

Construction - lasted all this time

Distortion, coloration, imbalance.

I disagree with the previous reviews. I ended up reconnecting all kinds of gear thinking that these fine looking speakers shouldn't be making these crummy sounds. But when I was all done, I reconnected the Bozaks in the same spot and they sounded infinitely better (and those are my #3 or 4 system).

I keep thinking maybe a driver is shot - there are 5 of them. No matter, though, they aren't a total piece of crap and they are sooo nicely made.

The lady I bought them from didn't want to haul them back to her barn. I bought 22 very mint records (2 from Blue Cheer!!!), a bike lock and two tomatoes from her. All that was supposed to cost $6.45. She wanted me to take it all with the speakers for $10. I gave her $12. Her husband had brought the speakers back from Guam (probably 30 years ago).

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Beautiful homebuilt speakers, a pair of Bozaks, JBL's and Bose. This pair comes after all those in the list of speakers I own.