More Vintage Goodness!

So yet again I am perusing the NW 50th and MacArthur Goodwill, and as usual nothing good comes of it. Then this odd looking brown box comes into view. It's got that weird rusted looking grate on top, similar to my Kenwood from 197x. I pull it off the shelf and take it to the power outlet. Hey, it's one of those old Technics receivers that people rave about. Model SA-303. It looks nice that's for sure, with its analog tuner dial and LED lights for meters. Personally I prefer the VU type meters, there is just something about it that strikes the mechanical side of me.

It powers on and the meters dance when I play with the tuning. It's very dirty, with red dust all over it meaning it was probably in a shed somewhere for many years. Oh hell, its $3, why not?

I buy this bad buy and take it home, hooking it up to a cheap set of speakers just in case the output transistors are fused and decided to blow up. I don't want my $1000 B&W's to explode in a firestorm of vintage sparks, you know? The first thing I try is the tuner, it works, but as with just about any old tuner, the stereo portion is difficult to pull in. Mono works fine, which means the "squelch" or whatever it's call on stereos is disabled. If you turn stereo on, it goes silent because it cannot lock a signal. No big deal, I'm not going to use it for FM anyways.

I hook into the AUX jack with my laptop and see if it will play some lossless FLAC. Works, but the left channel is distorted and static ridden. I twist the input selector knob and the volume to see if it's a pot that is causing the issue. The volume seems fine. The input selector pot is the cause. Apparently it's not making contact when turned to the far clockwise position (AUX setting). If I plug into the tape input and flip the tape lever, the input is clear. This thing needs cleaning inside, and the pots need a shot of De-oxit.

Well I never get around to cleaning it. I play music through it for a while, and put this thing into the close for three months. Now let me tell you, this past Friday and Saturday night I stayed up until 2 or 4 am posting stuff on craigslist, this receiver certainly made it into that group. Asking price? $50. It's on the list for maybe eight hours before I get an email about it. Some country sounding woman calls me and asks about it. Don't you hate it when people call, text, or email you with a generic question like, "I'm interested in your receiver" ? Yes I know a lot of people only list one thing on Craigslist, but I even got one yesterday that said, "I'm interested". That was it. Interested in what? Do you have reference? Are you hot? Oh wait, it's probably a Craigslist item you're interested in, not a casual encounter. Wrong section of the forums, buddy.

Anyways, they say they want to buy it, so I pull it out and hook it up to some Beovox S45-2 "audiophile" bookshelf speakers that I picked up that very day. Well they never show up, so I figure they got disinterested. Sunday morning they call, but Rosey and I are on the way to the Edmond arts festival to kill some time. I tell them call me around 5pm and we'll meet up to do the deal. 5pm rolls around and nothing, I call them with no response. 6pm and nothing. Geez people, don't make a deal and then bail out, it's really annoying. Anyways around 6:40 they call saying they have to 'make plans' to come over because it's "so far away from Midwest City". Oh please, I drive with the girlfriend to Tinker every weekend so I can visit the Goodwill there.

Anyways around 7:45 this cracked out woman with meth-teeth shows up at my door with a five year old kid. I notice her giant extended-cab truck parked in the street instead of the driveway. My driveway is 2 cars wide and about 6 cars deep, seriously, DON'T BLOCK THE ROAD. It's dangerous and irresponsible, not to mention lazy.

Anyways she comes in, listens, and promptly pays me $50. That's a $47 profit, or approximately 1200% margin.

Crazy huh?

Total time invested? $10 of windexing the thing to get the dirt off.

Ratings:

Price: $3
Status: Flipped
Condition: 2.50 Stars
Cost: 0.1 Stars
Flippable: 3.5 Stars
Income: $47

Polka Polka Polk! RT55s

Ah, some of my favorite speakers in the world. The venerable Polk Audio RT55. Similar (actually almost exactly the same) to the RT55i, except it has black cones, not blue, and the veneer is vinyl not real wood.

Otherwise the drivers are exactly the same, and the specs as well.

Dual 6.5" woofers, a 1" trilaminate dome tweeter. 35hz-26khz.

Up to 200watts each!

Why do I like them so much? Well my dad has a pair, and has had them for well over ten years now. They have always impressed me as a "bookshelf" speaker, as they give the fuller sound of floorstanders. At his house they were set up in his bedroom 5.1/7.2 system for a number of years, on stands for his Yamaha powered system. They're biampable/biwirable so you can hook them up with some serious power, yet choose the type of amplification for high and low if you want a preferred sound.

I drove all the way out to Blanchard, OK to get these. The crazy guy selling them only wanted $50 for the speakers, or $100 for the whole setup - a 5 disc Sony CD changer, some cheap Sony DE-197 receiver, and the RT55s of course. I thought about buying the whole setup but decided I already have like 5 cd changers and an equivalent amount of receivers so I just took the speakers.

Taking them home was exciting, as it was almost an hour drive from the middle of nowhere, and the weather turned bad. Well I got them home and hooked them up, oh boy do they sing. Currently they sit attached to my Sony 555ES receiver with a healthy 120watts per channel powering them. There's a matching Polk CS-250 as the center and a Klipsch KSW-10 to round it off. No 5.1 in this room, our bedroom is too small and I sure as hell am not climbing up in our attic to run rear speakers if not necessary. I had a pair of Polk RT25s in tow for that job but decided to give them to my dad instead since he wanted an all-Polk 7.1 system (with the same RT55s mentioned earlier).

Music is definitely punchy as these are renowned for their bass response from such a small cabinet. Treble is well rounded and not too harsh. You can set these as large speakers if you want, however I let the receiver do the bass management and set them to small. They do 80hz on up and the rest goes to the subwoofer.

Ever since my dad got a pair, I wanted one. They ran well over $700 a pair so I never had the opportunity to buy them myself. At $50 for the pair I didn't drive, I floored it to get them. It is doubtful I will get rid of these any time soon, and when we move into a new house they are definitely coming with.

Ratings:

Price: $50
Status: Keeper
Condition: 5.00 Stars
Cost: 1.0 Stars
Flippable: 3.5 Stars
Potential Income: Unknown

Monetary Absentmindedness

This post will be separate from the other "great finds" normally associated with my blog. I have a pet peeve that most of you know about, something that irritates me beyond believe. This particular issue is when people post things on Craigslist with a price thats is unbelievably high. It's not usually ignorance that causes this, but the fact that they really think they can get that much money out of it. Before we continue further let's put a list of examples together:

• 6 year old computer that was "state of the art" in it's day. $1500
• 50 inch projection tv that's 12 years old, non HD, and $5000 in it's day. $1400
• Motorola Razr V3, $499 new 8 years ago. $300
• Iphone 3G (or HTC G1). Works perfectly, nothing wrong. Oh and the screen is shattered. $250
• 3 year old 50" plasma, 720p. $5000 new. $4000
• 51" Hitachi CRT projection, 1080p. $500.
• And the best ones... Sony PSP, 2 years old. Like new. $249 (msrp is $149)

The list goes on and on. A lot of them are centered around computers, but most of them are around old busted TVs. Do you really think that because you just spent $1500 on your new 50 inch+ plasma or LCD, that you'll be able to get the same $1500 for your 10 year old 50 inch projection tv? That's not how it works people. That's like taking you 10 year old car into the dealership and expecting them to give you a fair trade for a brand new one. Honestly I wish that craigslist had some sort of core logic that analyzed the product, and then compared it to the asking price. It it's way out of whack like these examples, it will just delete your post and laugh at you.

Let's dissect those a little bit. These are real examples as well. I wish I could say I were making it up, but I'm not.

So the six year old computer. Computers depreciate faster than cars. The instant you drive one off the lot you don't lose 10% of the value or something small like that, you lose half the value of the computer. Why is that? Because the instant you buy a PC, it's already outdated by something newer, faster, stronger. Trying to sell your old busted PC for more than one that is new is just a dumb idea. In the case of today, someone had a Dimension 8200 for sale with a printer and what they think is a 21" LCD. Asking price was $1500. That's insanity to think they would actually get that, or even anywhere in the magnitude of 1/10th that. To prove that point you can go buy a Quad core i7 with 4-8 gigs of ram and fully deck it out for $1500. That much money buys a top tier computer nowadays complete with 24" LCD full high def. Even the lowest end computers with a celeron would outpace that computer by a magnitude of 5 to 10.

I'm going to group all the televisions into one to save some typing. Just because you spent $5000 on that big ass tv ten years ago, doesn't mean it's worth $1500 today. It may have been the latest and greatest back then, but now it's not even good enough to be relegated to the hole in the wall sports bar because it only does 480i and s-video is it's highest resolution input. It doesn't matter how big the tv is, if it's old it's old. Size of a television that age is only important to the homeless guy who might make a shelter out of it. Maybe a walk in closet or something? It would take literally 8-10 of those old CRT non-hd sets to equal the resolution of one 1080p set of any size. Then there are the people who advertise their televisions with specifications that aren't true. Come on people, we all live in the day and age of Google. It's just a quick type and a click away to knowing exactly what something has, and what it's worth. Your 51" Hitachi that you say is 1080p? Hate to break it to you buddy, but 99.9% of all CRT tvs out there do NOT do 1080p, they're 1080i. In fact you probably shouldn't try to tell me it is when I owned that same tv for 4 years. Then there's the people who have the three or four year old plasma/lcd for sale that they say is "1080i" and totally worth more than a brand new one. First off, only one brand makes a 1080i digital flat panel (it's a plasma), that's Hitachi. They don't make them anymore. Second, no one, I repeat NO ONE makes a 1080i LCD panel. They're all 720p or 1080p. That's 1280x800 or 1366x768, or 1920x1080. They're all progressive. LCD's as a technology cannot be interlaced, period. And finally, trying to scam the same amount of money out of your decade old box that you just paid for your brand new plasma isn't just shady, it's outright retarded. I don't even have to explain that one.

And lastly there are the phones/game systems. Don't try to get retail out of your phone when the screen is shattered. Don't say it "works fine except the touch screen". It's an IPHONE. Seriously? How the hell can it work fine if the screen is shattered and doesn't work? Nolan and I have seen this multiple times where peopel try to scam their broken stuff as working. On a similar note, the people who get pissy and say that a new Iphone is only $299 or $399 or whatever, and getting upset because people are selling their brand new unlocked one for $349 or $449, get a clue. The $299 or $399 price is WITH A CONTRACT. I know you don't understand what this means because if you did, you wouldn't be so dumb as to post your hate ads on craigslist telling the sellers how dumb they are for selling higher than retail. Walk into an AT&T store and see how much an Iphone is without a contract. It's not $299 or $399. It's $499 and $599. So unless the people on craigslist are selling those phones with a contract, they're actually selling it below retail.

And lastly there's the game systems. People seem to think these don't depreciate, or that there is still some shortage going on. Last time I walked into Walmart and Target there were cases FULL of every single game system that's out right now. Yes that means the Wii, and the PS3, and Wii Fit. So to you people charging $100 more than retail for your year old used system, I'm just going to flag you for being stupid. And yeah I probably will put up an informative post to let everyone know how dumb you are, and how they can get the exact same product with warranty for less by strolling into their local merchant.

As stated previously, the world of Google is at your fingertips. You can't feign ignorance since obviously you have internet. How else could you have posted the ad on Craigslist? Do your research, put a fair price and don't put misleading information in your ads. Someone will call you out on it. At the very least they'll flag it and you'll be left wondering why your post was removed.

And that's all I have to say about that. (today).