It was a good day at the thrift shop

I just got back from Ohio and visiting family. I scored an original Stanley Brothers on the King label ($5), Sarah Vaughan "Crazy mixed up" w/Joe Pass ($5), Pontiac Bros. ($3), Sade "Lush life" ($3), Wes Montgomery "Best of" on Riverside ($5), Ben Webster/Sweets Edison ($1.50), Sanatra at the Sands ($5), a white vinyl Hartless Bastards ($$13.99 new)...... All of em mint and original..... plus many others.

Very cool!

Chris

08-03-07: Dlr
I just missed a Hafler amp. Some old guy got it instead. But I did get one of those Chase line preamps that adds remote control to older pieces for $5. It works fine.

Hey, did you know that those Chase preamps took on a second life as a giant-killer line-level preamp?

I remember back in the mid'90s, the local boutique store that carries lots of British gear (Naim, Rega, VPI, Creek, Cambridge, Tannoy...), when it came to a low-cost line level preamp, they felt that the quietest and most transparent for less than $800 was the Chase, which they sold for around $129.

You might want to try your Chase as a standalone pre, maybe in conjunction with a phono stage, to see what it can do.

I got 2 pair of Shahinian Obelisks ($2800 new) at 2 different shops in the same week in Manhattan. 1st pair was 40, second pair was 75. Got a parasound CD Player for 10.00. Pair of Allison One's for 25.00 Pair of KEF 104.2 for 150.00.

Yesterday got 8 mint LP's for 2.00, most still have the wrap on. Supertramp, Cat Stevens, Jefferson, Billy Joel, YES, Squeeze, J. Giles. People don't have the room and everyone under 40 yrs has an Ipod. The thrift stores here have tons of classical stuff, musicals, etc and the dealers are constantly making the rounds.
Wealthy people living in 10 million dollar apartments redecorate and donate brand new very expensive furniture, electronics, etc so the boutique thrift shops (affiliated with a disease or hospital) have lines outside before they open and there is a race to get to the new inventory.

08-03-07: Somec59
I got 2 pair of Shahinian Obelisks ($2800 new) at 2 different shops in the same week in Manhattan. 1st pair was 40, second pair was 75. Got a parasound CD Player for 10.00. Pair of Allison One's for 25.00 Pair of KEF 104.2 for 150.00.

That's incredible. Did you get the Shahinians at boutique thrift shops? I know of a couple of hospital-affiliated thrift shops in my area. I guess it might really be worth the drive over.

Closest I came to something like that was a pair of early Nestorovic's (list about $1600) in a pawn shop for $250. I had just bought a pair of speakers for the living room so I passed. I kick myself every time I think of that one.

I can't think of anything that applies to the saying "One man's trash is another man's treasure" the way it applies to LPs. People can't WAIT to unload them, they require maintenance, they lack the portability of cassettes, CDs, and MP3s, and they only play 20 minutes at a time.

And yet, to me the only musical treasure that eclipses a well-recorded, well-mastered LP in excellent condition is a live performance by a world class artist. Not a CD, not an SACD, not a surround-sound DTS-encoded concert DVD.

To me, LPs border on magic, containing--as they do--an actual physical model of some (mixed and mastered) version of the performance as it happened in the studio or auditorium. Pretty much everything that happened is in that groove in the form of a blip or a zig-zag or an undulation. One side of a record is about 1400 ft. long. The temperature at the stylus can reach 500 deg. F from the friction, which momentarily melts or displaces the vinyl until the stylus passes by. A good turntable/tonearm/cartridge setup can resolve things as small as .1 micron.

CDs are the P-mount tonearms of recorded music. They're format-limited to how much detail, ambience, and speed can be retrieved. If it can't be resolved within a 16-bit/44.1KHz digitization, it's gone.

I bought a nice pair of Klipsch Cornwalls for $130 at a local pawnhop and the salesman paid the tax.