Very Cheap Speakers

Castle and B&W for £10

These two pairs of speakers were bought in 2015 for just £10

Both were purchased early in the morning from local car boot sales.

Castle Kendal

The first to be acquired were the floor standing Castle Kendal. These are beautiful speakers with a real wood veneer finish. They hark from the days when Castle speakers were proudly manufactured in Yorkshire in the North of England. These are now connected to my Denon UD-M30 mini system in the family lounge. They actually take up the same space as the original Denon bookshelf speakers on stands. At 6:30 in the morning as the man pulled them from his van, he took just £6 for them. I didn’t bother to haggle.

A couple of weeks later I bought a pair of these.

Bowers & Wilkins DM600i.

They were lurking under a table on the floor. The vendor first asked for £4. He explained that one of them was very thin sounding, with no bass. I was thinking possibly a lose wire, which would take half an hour to fix, or maybe a damaged bass driver, which would be uneconomical to repair. For £4? What the hell. Before I could pay the man, he asked me if I would just take them off his hands for £2. Rude not to, I thought.

DM 600i

The fault was very simple. These speakers have two sets of terminals for bi-wiring. The bridging copper straps necessary for single wiring were missing from one speaker. He simply hadn’t connected the base driver terminals. A couple of inches of decent speaker cable soon saw things right.

A couple of weeks later I bought a pair of Gale stands for the B&W for just £2. So, total outlay of just 10 for two fantastic pairs of speakers. These are the speakers that myself and my family use on a day to day basis. So far nothing better has turned up at the boot sales.