JBL Studio 1 series 180 & 190 tower speakers $129.99/$169 each @newegg.com

I bet you have some internal noise and you just haven't noticed it yet. Certain songs didn't have a problem. It's with certain notes that the vibration noise could be heard. Put on some thumping bass and turn it up a little, then put your ear close to the cabinet at mid-range speaker level. I bet you hear a slight rattle from the enclosure. Seems like a poor design and the speakers in general looked very cheap. I wouldn't be able to recommend these to anybody who was looking for tower speakers.

I bought the 180's last year for $115 each from wwstereo.com. Plenty of others did over at the avsforums too and compared them to their equipment, Polk, PSB, among other I can't rememeber - someone even replaced his Axiom M80 ($1500/pr) towers with the 190's and preferred them, but he was admittedly getting tired of the sound of the M80's. Everyone I remember posting about them was very impressed for the price, they're great towers for the price we're paying. Sound quality is and always has been personal and subjective as we all know however.

Further, I and no one else noticed any rattle or vibration in the midrange, having lived with mine for a year and gotten my ears inches close to drivers when I notice distortion/noise in a recording cause I'm anal. Something was defective about your pair unfortunately. Bad driver/mount, loose wiring, loose something, could be anything.

The fact that they look so.. weird is attributed to why they didn't sell well over here and subsequently dropped price. They're still doing superb over in EU though, at market price.

I believe part of the problem with the 180's was my Onkyo receiver. It produces much more bass than my previous Yamaha receivers. If I were listening to these speakers through a Yamaha receiver it probably wouldn't have been as noticeable. I do believe the one with the higher pitched vibration was defective, but the other one didn't have this issue. The other one did have a little rattle coming from the enclosure of the mid-range speaker when the bass was hitting hard. I think that's not as noticeable and just a flaw in the design. I would find it hard to believe that I got the only two speakers out of the thousands of this model that had these issues. Anyway, hopefully those who picked these up have no issues with them going forward.