Loudspeaker warranties and black market products

Warranties are mostly useful in the first weeks or months of ownership where manufacturing defects are usually revealed.  After that, speakers should last for decades, unless they are abused.  Those who blow out speakers from playing them too loudly don’t get much sympathy from me.

The most important part of my speaker system is a compression driver that is close to 90 years pld; the warranty has probably expired (and the company too).  The rest of the system is nearing twenty years old.  I don

If you are concerned about speaker longevity, the two things to look out for if you want more than ten years of service are: 1) the type of surround for the woofer--foam rubber surrounds tend to crumble after a certain number of years, particularly if they are exposed to strong light (drivers can be re-foamed by services that are out there that specialize in this service); and 2) presence of ferromagnetic fluid in the voice gap of tweeters that tend to get gummy and dry out (there are also services that clean out and replace such fluid).  

Speakers are quite durable when not abused by excessively high volume play or being used as scratching posts by cats, etc.  It is also remarkable how many older speakers sound really good even though they don't have the supposed benefit of modern materials and technical improvements.

Not only is it a myth that gobs of power improves the sound even when not much power is actually being delivered, it is, to my taste anyway, the case that lower power amps sound better.