Your best audio related thrift store or garage sale find

I like lurking in Yahoo auction

Proton 300/301 table radio $10
nice Denon integrated amp $40
Yamaha YH-1 headphones $1 (yes, one buck)
Mission bookshelf speakers $15
etc, etc, etc...

I found a small, antique tube guitar amp in excellent condition, in a small thrift store about 10 years ago. It must have sat in someone's closet for decades. I got the guy to plug it in and the original tubes lit up. Unfortunately I didn't buy it because I didn't need another piece of electronic junk for $20. The amp had a logo on it that read "K&F". About a month later I was looking at a hardcover book about the history of Fender amplifiers, and don't I see a large photo of the same amp on page one. Turns out "K & F" stood for "Kaufman and Fender" and that little amp was an extremely rare sample of Leo Fender's very first amplifier... before he formed his famous company, when he owned a radio shop and was in partnership with Kaufman in the early 1940's . The book said the amps were hand built by Fender himself and the grey, crackle paint finish was baked on in his wife's kitchen oven. It went on to say that only a handful from the original 600 made, survived today. Also, the sample I held in my hands was in much better condition than the one in Fender's museum. It was probably worth many thousands of dollars to a serious Fender collector. I still kick myself about it.

For $7.98 I got a pair of Marantz high effiency bookshelf speakers and sounds very good with a budget 5 watt tube amp. I got some really nice vintage 1950s tubes for a few dollars on ebay. Hi fi can be possible on a bargain!

The 12 used Jazz/Smooth Jazz CDs I found for a quarter each. They looked so lonely in that box. I just stood there for like five minutes opening up the cases and looking at each one. All in good enough condition. Was going to pick out a handful to buy, but I just grabbed the whole pile. Figured as long as I liked one or two of them, it was worth it. Liked them all. Actually got me into jazz, and kickstarted my interest in upgrading headphones.

Less impressive than all of yours, but an important personal find. I'm going to go to more garage sales now.

not sure if you're just BSing us on this one...


nothing much on the listening side of audio... my best deals are all from rummage sales on the creative side of audio

Peavey TNT100 bass amp $5... just needed a fuse and a little soldering
Alesis Microverb 1 $3
EV N/D267as microphone $3

Aside from dozens of used LPs I love, the biggest score was sort of an audio item. It is a Hallicrafters Skyrider 23 (aka SX-23). I found it at a junk store out in Burns, Oregon. Burns is about two hours east of Bend and along the way, as the saying goes, "there are only two trees and one of them's dead."

I used to occasionally get assigned a criminal case out there and would drive out to meet with clients and go to court. The courthouse has a bunch of donated mounted game heads on the walls and the prisoners are in a 19th century stone and iron jail underneath the court. They still wear black and white striped uniforms, too. I always enjoyed the trip back in time.

Anyhow, there was a junk store out there that had a bunch of tube gear. I was in the market for a "boatanchor," which is what the old tubed communications receivers are called. I saw the Skyrider 23, asked about it, and the owner wanted $50. So I gave him $50.

I drove it back and set about trying to find the service manual. Strangely, nothing turned up. Neither did much else information. So I contacted the Hallicrafters guy (Chuck Dachis) and discovered that it is a rare, hard-to-find model. Chuck sent me a copy of the service manual, and the Skyrider 23 has been a favorite ever since.

I keep an eye on these at eBay. They rarely come up and I've seen them go for as much as $1,400.

Oh, for those not familiar, communications receivers pick up AM, shortwave, amateur bands, and a whole lot else. This one has 13 tubes and was top-of-the-line in 1939. These were freakishly expensive during the Depression and the War cut off production.

I've found quite a few other amazing bargains in junk stores (furniture, antique lighting and electric fans), but the Skyrider 23 is the best audio purchase.

What's sad is that eBay has killed off a lot of the great finds. Everyone knows what things are worth these days. I bought most of my good stuff in the mid to late 1990s, when you could still find amazing stuff for nothing.

AKG K1000 for $500

100% fact. Why would you think I'd be BSing?

In fact, I was so traumatized by the event, here's a lament about it I put on Harmony Central not long after it happened ( 1998 ). Turns out it was only $10, not $20, and it was around 3 months, not 1 month after that I purchased the fender books ( Hey, it was 12 years ago and my memory sucks ). Also, back then at that time I had 21 amps. I now have just under 50 vintage tube amps in my collection. But not Leo Fender's very first production model.

Once I found out what I'd missed, I even ran a couple of "old amps wanted" ad in the local paper, hoping it would surface. No luck, but I did manage to find a couple of other old Fender amps, plus a mint condition Fender lap-steel guitar with legs ( for $50.00 ) from the ad.

i dunno i guess it's the fact i would have jumped just on the fact that the tubes alone would have been worth more than what they were asking for it

but excuse me while i point and laugh

*points and laughs*

Fair enough. At that point in time I wasn't at all interested in tube guitar amps and never considered the value of the tubes. ( there wasn't many in it, it was just a 4 or 6 watt amp I believe. It was just old junk in a junk store to me. I'm an impulse buyer and a chronic collector of many things and unfortunately at that particular moment I convinced myself to "do the right thing" and not buy any more useless junk. Usually I do the opposite. Bad timing. I've seen several old K&F lapsteel guitars for sale since then, (they don't seem to have much demand) but not one single K&F amplifier.

Hard to say. I'm currently refurbishing som ESS PS-920 speakers i picked up for $10, but the heil tweeters may turn out to be the only truly valuable components.

Possibly the ADS L810 speakers i picked up for $24 in 1994 that remained my primary speakers until i acquired Ohm Walsh 3's from a friend last year.

I love my local goodwill store, might not always be great stuff, but lots of stuff worth trying out and experimenting with. Here are some of my favourite picks

TEAC bookshelf speakers - these arent the cheap ones that come with the shelf stereos, these were proper ones and they were really compact and sounded surprisingly good on my system, I've since set these up for my bedroom system. 10$

JVC CD player from early 90's. This is part of my bedroom setup as well, for 15 bucks, it works great, is super quiet and sounds quite good. 15$

Realistic Nova 4 - Picked these up for refoaming project, just for kicks. Worked out quite well, not the best sounding speakers, but they look very unique and it was a fun project. 10$

Yamaha 5cd changer - This is a fairly recent player, in great shape, which I even brought to the Headfi meet recently, works great, fastest access time in my experience, and is a great transport. The right channel has some minor noise issues in the analog outs, but for 10 bucks I'm not complaining.

I've picked up a few other speakers and stuff which were still fantastic deals, but didnt quite end up making it in a rig I listen to cos they werent as good. But its always worth an occasional visit to find some random stuff.

Do they have yellow woven kevlar wooflets, like these?

http://www.overstock.com/Electronics...4/product.html

If so, you and i have some similar speaks. I found a pair at one thrift store and a third at another thrift store, gonna wire up a 7.1 rig in the bedroom (using some old KEF Uni-Q's as rears and Boston A120 as sides - all thrift store finds. Still working on what to use as a sub).

Nobody at the denver meet 2 years ago was at all impressed by my $5 Rotel CDP of similar vintage, not that anyone actually listened to it, so i didn't bother mentioning it here.

Edit: Come to think of it, my Walsh 3's were a garage sale find - just not found by me. Got 'em for $150, which is about 1/2 to 1/3 the going rate. One of them needs a fuse lightbulb replaced or something (gets quiet if there is a lot of bass for more than a second or two), though, and one of them has much more faded veneer than the other.