What Product Did You Overspend On?

Synergistic Tesla Apex loom and AC wire. Average wire for 3x the price it should retail for. Bought into the hype.

MOst of my CD collection.

Hi Sid42

I felt the exact same way about the 2 channel analog output of the stock BDP-83. For movies though the 7.1 analog outputs were great for my HT system.

Now back to the topic at hand.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’ve spent a bit of money on various things audio and the one item that I’ve overspent way too much money on was a Phase Linear 700B. Yes you read right a Flame/Fuzz Linear 700B.

I originally saw a listing on another forum where a very good condition PL 700B was listed for $350 shipped. I had read the good and the bad about the amp but liked the look of it from looking at various sites on the net so I jumped in and bought it. To my dismay when it arrived it had a bent chassis in the rear, the front face was very discolored due to it being in a smokers home. I didn’t complain because I didn’t do the proper due diligence when buying.

At the time this PL 700B was supposed to be my “reference” amp of my 2 channel rig but I couldn’t find a repair shop that was easy for me to get to and didn’t have hours that worked with my schedule at the time. Or a repair place would need it to be shipped an dI didn’t want to risk more damage.

I did find a pro audio shop and for another $350 they would bring my PL 700B up to spec. I think they just cleaned it up, took it apart and put it together. So now I’m $700 into it. A week or so later I’m listening and I find there is a hum coming from my speakers that isn’t a ground loop. Since I didn’t want to pay those guys in the pro audio shop because they took a lot of time on the amp and didn’t do much I found another place to fix the 700B. It turned out there were issue with the old capacitors and other areas that the pro audio shop missed. So for another $375 everything would be fixed. New speaker binding posts, new/larger caps put in, new rca jacks etc etc. I don’t know what I was thinking but one thing I do remember was since the beast was so big and difficult to ship and I would be selling at a large loss so I decided to have the thing repaired again. Now the repair took some time to complete so I picked up a Sumo Nine Amp on the cheap and found I really liked the Class A sound.

I get the Phase Linear 700B back and take out the Sumo Nine and listen to it for some time. It was too difficult for me to A/B and I find I now really didn’t like the sound of the Phase Linear 700B. I check various sites to see what a refurbished 700B is going for and the loss would be too great for me. I already shelled out $1075. So now the PL 700B is the subwoofer amp for my HT set-up and it does a fine job. I made sure the PL 700B is in site so I can be reminded of my bad judgment and overspending. Man this was therapeutic. Thanks

A VonSchweikert Visiun centerchannel speaker, even at half of RR$. It is just another expensive speaker that is so adjustable one could make it sound horrible.

After a month or 2 of fooling with that, I reinstalled the Eminent Technology LFT-12 (the all-mag-planar version) and have been thrilled ever since.
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I spent $1.5k on a used pair of interconnects from a highly regarded manufacturer, only to find an interconnect I liked better at less than 1/3 the price.

With cables, there are probably a lot of stories like that.

Bryon