Hello all

I just registered for the forum and would greatly appreciate some advice from the experts on here. I wondered if this should be in the vintage forum and so please accept my apologies and feel free to move the topic if so. 

I bought a set of Beolab 4000 speakers on ebay from Italy. They arrived this morning and I excitedly unpacked them and set them up. I connected the power cables (they didn't come with the polarised c7 cables and so I used regular c7s after doing some googling and looking at the service manual diagrams for signs that they need to be). I set the mode switch to line and then hooked up a phono cable to each and then to a 3.5mm jack to my iPad to do some basic function testing. I noticed that even before I had pushed the power button on one of the units that it started to play audio. Thinking this was strange, I pushed the power button in and the led lit up red and remained so. The audio continued and seemingly the power button has no effect on whether or not the unit produces audio. It seems to be always live and always lit red.

The other speaker initially lit up red when the power button was pressed and remained so, even after ensuring that it was definitely receiving signal. After turning it off and on a few times, each time leaving it to rest for 10-30 seconds, it lit up green and I was able to get audio out of it. I did notice once or twice that the led slowly turned from green to red, going an amber colour in between and then the audio cut out and the led turned solid red. 

Sorry for the long explanation, I just wanted to get confirmation that these are toast before I submit a buyer dispute claim on ebay. Maybe someone will tell me I am doing something stupid and I will gladly welcome that! :D I am scratching my head with this, as surely the seller would have known that I will be returning these and he will have to pay the return postage as ebay will surely rule in my favour? If it were only one speaker that was faulty then I could accept that perhaps the seller did not know it was faulty or flaky, but for both to be behaving oddly makes me think that he must have known.

Thank you very much for any advice.