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

LOUD ASS MUSIC

So I was at Goodwill again two weeks ago, and did the 60 second tour. Nothing great, except this giant-ass black cabinet. Even larger than the Klipsch Forte II's, and covered in the same material as the Peavey gear from not too long ago.

What was it? A Yamaha S4115h speaker. I have no idea what type of speaker it is. I assume it's for live sound, or some PA equipment. It uses those 1/4" jacks which I still have, but unfortunately I have no amp. Also, there's only one speaker! What the hell is with people donating only one speaker! Oh well it's $10, so I decide to buy it. It's got a huge metal horn on top, and a 15" woofer below. I bet the efficiency on this thing is far north of 95db, meaning it will get loud, with almost no power.

I roll this outside and try to fit it in my car. No go. We wrestle for it a bit and somehow get it in the back seat. Well I get it home and it sits in the garage for two weeks. Rosey doesn't even notice it for most of that time. Meanwhile I'm looking for a way to power this thing. None of my amps or receivers output with a 1/4" phono plug. The Peavey PA-400 did, but that's long gone. I went to Guitar Center and picked up a 1/4" female to banana plug adapter (I have a 1/4" 6ft speaker cable at home from the PA-400). In addition I found an E-MU 1212m sound card that I'm going to try out. It was $40.

What's funny is the adapter for the speaker was $15!!! The damn speaker was only $10. Not the greatest investment ever. Well I was lazy for a week and never hooked it up, so on a subsequent visit to the Goodwill they apparently found some 20ft 1/4" to banana plug cables. They had two of them which lead me to believe there should be another speaker...somewhere. Anyways the cables were only $1 each so I bought them up and returned the adapter.

This weekend I pulled the Onkyo DS575 5.1 receiver out of the closet and dragged it to the garage with my laptop. I plugged it all up, and noticed there was something stuck in one of the inputs of the speaker. I grabbed it with my Gerber multi-tool (thanks Rosey!) and yanked it out. Well it was a broken off 1/4" phono that someone must have sheared off. Powered it on and turned up the volume slowly.

Test material? Journey Remastered in FLAC lossless through my USB Creative MP3+ adapter, using RCA interconnects to the receiver. I guess I could have used the optical out, oh well.

So I turned it up to 50, or half with the speaker facing away and I could hear it clearly reflecting off the building.... 200 feet away across the street. Wow this thing is loud. The sound quality? Well it IS a PA speaker, so it wasn't that great. That's not really what it was designed for anyways, so no big deal. This thing is a HUGE party speaker. Just one channel running not even close to a full 80 watts @ 8 ohms was breaking 100db easily. Rosey came running outside like something had blown up and told me she couldn't hear the TV inside the house because it was so loud. I only had it up half way! I cleaned it up a little, there was dust all over it and inside the horn, and it only got louder.

Rosey wants me to sell it. It was only $10... I wonder if I can get $200 out of it? I'm not sure. I'll test the waters. If not I'm going to Ace hardware, ordering some chains and hanging it from the garage ceiling.

Ratings:

Price: $10
Status: Stored
Condition: 3.00 Stars
Cost: .5 Stars
Flippable: 3.5 Stars
Potential Income: Unknown

Samsung 46B6000 LED tv, 46" 120hz $1299

So I bought a Samsung 46B6000 the other week, and let me tell you, it's one sweet ass tv. It's less than an inch thick for most of the tv, the thickest being just a hair over an inch. It's got a great black level, and looks sweet hanging on the wall. Basically, I love this tv. The problem? It was about $700 more than I wanted to spend on a tv. Yeah my income tax returns just came in and I made a little extra cash from my usual clients, but I really went into Best Buy with the intention of spending about $700, but not going over $1000 out the door.

Well, nothing was in stock! I tried the 50" plasmas from Panasonic and Samsung, to the Sony Bravias, to the other brands on the wall. None of them were in stock! Back and forth we went, from Ultimate electronics (who had a nice deal on a W series 40" Sony) to Best Buy, to Sears, and even Sams Club! No one had anything in stock so standing at Sears I spied yet another Samsung 46" LED tv. They had it on sale for $1299, which is an insane price considering the tv had a MSRP of $2499.99 less than a year ago! The colors are great, it looks sexy as hell, and it's not a horrible price. So I ask the Sears guy if they have any in stock, and while he was checking (for the longest time) we took the price tag and left.

I took it back to Best Buy and asked my friend to price match, which they should according to their policy.They did, but I didn't get the free blu-ray player with it. Oh well, I have enough blu-ray players and the amount I could get from selling the new one on Craigslist would be less than I saved with the price-match.

Taking a look at the employee cost at Best Buy (friend), they were selling it at $100 below their margin line at $1499 as it was, so another $200 off the top really killed them. I certainly didn't shed a tear.

Took it home and hooked it up - oh.my.God. The image is amazing. Wall-E was so crisp, the colors blew away the old JVC by a factor of 50 fold. Hanging it on the wall was a challenge however. The old tv was a 42",  which used a 200x200mm bolt pattern. The new tv is 46", and uses a 400x400 bolt pattern. The mount on the wall is more than sturdy enough to hold it, as the new tv weighs like 40lbs instead of 90. Gotta love LED technology. The problem was the old brackets were only 200mm tall, not 400mm. That meant only the top bolts would attach. I thought to myself... at the store they have the tv hanging from only the top 2 bolts since it was hung just like a picture, so I know it will hold up with just the top bolts attached. The problem was that if you dont secure the bottom of the bracket, they swivel the instant weight is put on them. To keep each bracket straight I took the bottom hole and used picture wire to tie it to the bottom bolts, effectively keeping it straight. Hung it on the wall and it looks great.

What really sucks is that the tv is so thin, it's right up on the wall, and the window sill directly beneath the tv blocks the speakers. You can't hear a damn thing. Oh well, there's a receiver hooked to it.

Anyways, this is definitely 5 stars in terms of how good the tv is. Unfortunately it was still $700 more (after tax) than I wanted to spend, so I think it's going back. I doubt it will sell out lower than $1499 (that's almost 1600 after tax), so if anyone wants it before I return it, I'll sell it for $1450 straight cash right now. It's 2 weeks old and has 30 days left on the return policy (perk of being reward zone silver apparently). Otherwise I'm just taking it back for my money.

I ordered a 47" Sharp 1080p 120hz last night however, to replace this. It's not quite as good, but its $700 less. No explanation on that necessary, lol.

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).

Goodwill theory....

So Nolan and I have this theory, well mainly Nolan but I agree with him. I have my own theories but we'll get to those later (remember Hemi).

To quote Nolan (Stambaugh): (excuse the spelling, sometimes he's special)

Noramlly thrifts have used clothes obviously, Lots of glassware - useful or not. right now you know im in the Alcohol related glassware which i can usually score. Crutches... for soem reason because alot of people need them once and arent stupid enough to do whatever they did again so they get rid of them

and skii's... probly what people did to need cruthces

Anyways it pretty much holds true. I've never been to any thrift store that didn't have one, if not all of these. And to that list I add golf clubs. So as a test I'm going to update this blog every time I remember to take pictures at the thrift store I happen to be at. Here's yesterday:


So, as you can see in the top picture.. Skis, and a ton of golf bags. There are more clubs than bags so the rest of the clubs are in the corner behind where you can't see. In the second picture you can see yet another pair of crutches. Are these the only pair? I wouldn't bet my life on it. What's really funny is a pair of crap wooden crutches are $50 from Walgreens, and metal ones like this which are basically brand new are $90! I think the price marked was $3 on these. You do the math and tell me where I should go if I ever break my foot dropping a piece of Goodwill audio gear.

There are other trends too, but we'll get to those at a later date.

There's PA in goodwill? or goodwill in PA? hmm

Well I was in Goodwill (yes, again.. get used to it) in August and once again there was nothing good in the usual spots. The usual spots being :

1. Front glass counter
2. Rear Electronics wall
3. Front of store by the telescope that never sells.

I decided to veer off my 60-second path and go over to where the busted furniture usually is. I see these odd black cabinets, and immediately I realize they're PEAVEY ... something. Well there's this old ass PA-400 amp and two 12" cabinets. $70 on the tag for the whole setup. I plug it in, the lights come on. Some of the output transistors have been replaced, but it looks good. Next question, will this fit in my trunk? Who knows, but I'm going to find out! Dragged it all to the counter with the usual lady giving me the weird looks because she has no idea what or why I'm buying again. Here is the result:

So apparently my 2006 STS trunk while small, still fits 2 12" cabinets, a head, and about 22 bottles of 2 liter cola.

Well I got it home and realized I don't have any 1/4" jacks to power or connect this damn thing. Off to Guitar center to buy them. I hook it up and play some music. The buzz is so annoying. I think it's normal for PA gear but considering I use B&W speakers and amplifiers with significantly lower THD... this is bleh. I bet they would have made a great setup for the garage if I wanted movie night with the projector on the door, but nah.

So I sold them, and made a tidy profit (600%).

Ratings:

Price: $60
Status: Flipped
Condition: 3.00 Stars
Cost: 1.5 Stars
Flippable: 4.5 Stars
Potential Income: 4.5 Stars

I should probably make a chart for what these ratings mean huh?

What's that? Rotel?

So the final piece of equipment from the trip to the 23rd/MacArthur thrift store is one of my prized posssesions, a mint condition Rotel RC-972 preamp. I've wanted a higher end preamp for some time but they were few and far between, not to mention the fact that they're outlandishly priced. This coupled with the fact that I'm always broke, and don't really want to spend any more than is necessary...this not being a necessary item and all.

Anyways what excited me the most about it was the $5.98 scribble across the top in red wax pen. Rotel... six dollars.... wait what? That's akin to my Cadillac having a sticker price of $1000. A quick google shows this as an almost $900 unit.

http://www.audioreview.com/cat/amplification/preamplifiers/rotel/rc-972/PRD_118380_1591crx.aspx

How does it sound? Great. It's neutral. I turn all tone controls off on it. I like that its remote controlled (I still have to find one...). It replaced my NAD preamp and I haven't looked back. I could probably flip it for $400 or so, but I've always wanted something of this caliber, and I probably will keep it until I find something better, like a McIntosh or something.

Currently this is attached to my NAD214 amplifier and B&W DM2000's. Awesome :)

Ratings:

Price: $6
Status: Keeper
Condition: 4.50Stars
Cost: 1 Star
Flippable: 4.5 Stars
Potential Income: 5 Stars