Pioneer CS-33 worth buying?

[rotaspec]

I have the opportunity to buy a pair of working Pioneer CS-33 speakers fairly cheap. They contain a PW 801H 8" woofer and a PT 20H 2" tweeter coupled by a capacitor. Anyone know much about them sonics wise (Hi-Fi, Lo-Fi, Junk?)
Would these be a good match for a little tube amp (5W/ch)?
Would they be good drivers for a newer design. The cabinets are just sealed boxes of about 0.7 cu.ft I think?
Thanks
Gary

[bobhowell]

I had a pair and gave them to my brother who lost track of them. I still have CS 77's and have looked at them with the thought of upgrading. Found they are actually BR, not sealed. Small screws in the corner remove the grill and reveal br design. They date from 1970. They have good woofer but treble is lacking. The box is all you are getting, And history.

[Moondog55]

Possible midrange for big OB

[head_unit]

Ooh, nasty grille cloth. Lo-fi or junk, only worth it as maybe garage speakers if real cheap.

[bardkallestad]

I have owned a set of Pioneer CS-77 Speakers since 1969 when I purchased them in Japan, where I was stationed in the U.S. military. I listened to all of the up-scale Japanese audio equipment of the day, Pioneer, Sansui, Kenwood, JVC, Panasonic, Sony, Yamaha, et-al.

I believe that (in general) Pioneer made the best speakers, Sansui & Kenwood made the best amplifiers and Teac & Akai made the best tape decks.

This dissertation is aimed at those who have speaker-building ability or are adventurous, in nature. The Pioneer CS-series of speakers were beautifully designed, and well built. They used high quality components and materials throughout. Only the foam-edged-surrounds and cross-over capacitors have deteriorated with age. Of course modern tweeters are superior to those of the 70's.

The speaker cabinets are furniture grade, made of real wood (ply or chip) and wood veneer. The CS-77 Through CS-99 are all wood or wood-veneer and well-braced and a pair of them will probably hold up an elephant.

Some of the later models, the smaller ones, were later produced with wood-looking vinyl and plastic lattice-work but were still nice looking and quality workmanship. Pioneer made good speakers.

If you are looking for modern, fantastic speakers, then I hope your pocketbook is fat. Really good speakers start in the mid-hundreds and run into the high thousands. I have seen speakers up around $80,000. However, they are for those with more money than brains. They are truly great speakers, just wildly over-priced for the audiophile with everything including a very large ego. IMHO

For the novice, stay away from the Pioneer models that had foam-edge-surrounds. Quoting Oak Tree Enterprises, "CS-66G, CS-77, CS-88a & CS-99 had foam surround tweeters". Otherwise, the cloth-edged speakers still sound very good today!

I have ordered several pair of Pioneer CS-Series speakers and cleaned them up and re-driver-ed them along with new cross-over circuitry and they are absolutely fantastic. You'd be hard put to build a quality cabinet like this for less money. If you don't mind the monkey-coffin size and the wood-lattice-work grilles (which I still think have style) then you have at the least a well-built cabinet to start your next project with. You can leave the grilles off, if you like them au-naturel.

Anyone who tells you they are garbage is a lot richer than I am, or another web pundit who makes dogmatic pronouncements within their limited scope of knowledge. Don't you wish everyone used their real name on these blogs?

P.S. My downstairs family room home-theater is setup with 7.1 sound system feeding three modified CS-77As augmented with three Altec Lansing cellular horns, with a modified, side-surround pair of bipolar CS-33A's plus a modified set of CS-22's for the rear-surrounds. No one complains about the cosmetics or the sound.

[sreten]

Pioneer CS-33 - AudioKarma.org Home Audio Stereo Discussion Forums

Hi, doesn't seem the original tweeter or original crossover, rgds, sreten.