Best bargain find ever ?

Sansui G-9000 at a thrift shop for $10!

It lit up beautifully when I plugged it in at the thrift shop but had some buzzing from some speakers I hooked it up to when I got it home. I had it brought back to specs at a reputable local audio repair place. Spend $100 and it's like new.

Weighs 65lbs and 160 watts of 1970's power. Has a strong tuner section too.

I "hear" ya on the Ohms!! I purchased a brand new pair of Ohm Walsh 2s with match grain oak cabinets - the salesman's price was $199 directly from the Ohm factory. I owned and loved those speakers for the next 10 years...

However, the B&O MMC-1 cartridge that I won in a factory sponsored contest is right up there. And the best part was that I was able to choose my cartridge from among 30 that we had recently received from B&O. I spent a *long* lunch hour reviewing the specs and looking at each stylus under a microscope. I ended up with a cartridge that spec'd. absolutely flat (within 0.25 db) from 20 Hz - 20 kHz.

I sold that cartridge 20 years later for $800, it had < 150 hrs. on it and was only used to transcribe albums from vinyl to reel-reel or CD. My MMC-2 (came with a B&O BG 9000 turntable that I bought for $250) was used for day to day playback...

-RW-

Walker Talismen for $75.00

I wandered into a thrift store and found ALL of the original Beatles albums in cassette format with the original carrier. 25 cents each, plus $1 for the carrier. The cassettes are like new. Someone probably bought them just before CDs were introduced and then never played them.

Best bargain EVER? I was in a pawn shop in Tallahassee, in the early 90's and there was a JBL Paragon in perfect shape, it had a $900 tag on it, I really didn't know anything about that model, but I loved JBL and the wood was to die for. I asked the sales guy about it and he said a senators son pawned it because he was on drugs, and said he just wanted out of his shop, offered it to me for $600. I lived 50 miles away and needed to bring back a van, so I left and came back a week later and it was gone. Too stupid to have not paid for it first, but I did not know at the time they were selling for $20 to $30 thousand dollars in Japan. To this day I wake up sometimes in a panic about that deal I missed!