Okay this isn't a Thrifty Pick at all. But I am so tired of the people on Craigslist saying the stupidest shit.
Here we go:
http://oklahomacity.craigslist.org/mcy/2601508815.html
I have a pair of STOCK Harley mufflers for sale. Picture, part number, and description in the ad. You'll notice I've modified the ad because I keep getting stupid emails/texts asking questions that are obviously answered in the ad.
One person asked if they were aftermarket. Google what "Stock" means buddy.
One person asked me what bike they were for. Dude the part numbers are in the ad.
One person was so bold as to ask why I had them. Noneofurfuckinbusiness.
I got tons of these with no offers to buy. Well, one guy offered but never showed up.
Today however, was a doozy of an interaction. This guy just didn't friggin' get it. For some reason he couldn't get it through his damned head that the "dents" in the mufflers are supposed to be there. They're manufactured into the muffler so when you mount them to the bike these go on, they clear the frame and don't rub. He kept saying he'd offer me $20 because they were damaged, or dented. I'm like dude, you can't offer less based on a feature. I explained it to him no less than four times that the dents are how they came. He might as well have been a brick wall. What's even stupider is his offers went up and down. Seriously. I'm just going to paste the conversation because it tells the story by itself:
What's even funnier is he said he understood halfway through, then went back to not getting it at all.
Please, go crawl back under that rock you came out, I'm done dealing with retards.
Friday, September 16, 2011
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
THX guys, I do like it loud...
Once again it's been a while. Craigslist has been crazy the past few months. I've sold more on Craigslist since my last post than I have in all my time otherwise, combined.
In the months of October and November I made more money selling the crap in our closets at home than I did working for Dell on my salary/wage. What does that mean? I sold a TON of high margin stuff. I just sold a DBX 4BX sound expander the other day for $225, and it only cost me $5 at Goodwill about 8 months ago. Most of my sales were like that. I was sitting on a gold mine and finally cashed it in.
So anyways, back to the topic at hand, something THX certified. In our home we have 3 systems you can watch movies on, one in the bedroom with my 46" LED, one in the middle living room with the 37" LCD, and one in the big living room with the 100" drop down high definition projector. Well my goal had been to upgrade all the systems eventually to HDMI with high definition codec decoding (DTS MasterHD, Dolby TrueHD, etc). So far I only had a mid-line Harman Kardon AVR254 7.1 HDMI receiver in the big living room. It's pretty damn good actually, but I've always wanted more. Don't forget my 10 year old Sony 555ES receiver that I sold for $200 as well, that's what started all this.
So, step 1 - make some money to buy a nice receiver. Well how do we make money, my thrifty pickers? Buy low and sell high. I perused the Best Buy auction site as usual, and craigslist, and Goodwill. In the end I bought two receivers for the time being, a Pioneer 820-K and 1019AH-K. Both were HDMI receivers, supporting 1080p and high def codecs. The 1019AH-K was last years model, 7.1 channel top of the line. It's identical to last years Pioneer Elite, sans the pre-outs and cool amber display. The 820-K is this years 5.1 HDMI 3D capable. Basically I paid about 100 for each one, as is coming only with the receiver. I used them in my bedroom and middle living room for a while.
Well the performance of them was unimpressive, so I sold them both. The 1019 sold for $225, and the 820k sold for $150. Not bad, I ended up with $375 made from $200. I also sold the Velodyne sub I bought at Goodwill, $200 on a $30 investment. So I decided to spend about $400 on a receiver, because Christmas is here and I didn't want to unload all my money on a receiver. I figured I'd get a mid line receiver, that was higher end than what I got from the Best Buy site. I looked around at Yamaha, Denon, Sony, and Onkyo. In the end I settled on the Onkyo TX-NR807 7.2 (9.2 with additional amps) Network receiver. It's last years $1100 HDMI receiver. The only thing it doesn't have is 3D capability. I could care less about that feature.
Well I ordered it refurbished from accessories4less.com and it arrived in 3 days. Cost? $429. I got the box with all the accessories and manual, and opened it up. It's in brand new shape. Not a single scratch on it. I seriously don't think this thing was ever used. It probably left the factory, was delivered and opened, and then returned. Well it saved me over $600 so I'm not complaining.
I was actually lazy this weekend, normally with a new toy of this magnitude I would have stopped any and everything I was doing to go hook it up. It wasn't until Sunday night that I decided to hook it up. I yanked all the wires out the back of my trusty HK AVR254 and put it to the side. Lately I've been on a kick of trying to clean up wires. I'm tired of having to twist speaker wires and stick them in the terminals, and screw it down. I bought a ton of Nakamichi banana plugs and I screwed them on the ends to make setup easier.
Anyways, the actual hookup of the receiver took about 30 seconds. 3 HDMI in (Bluray, Cable, HD-DVD) and 1 out (LCD/Projector) along with the power cord. That's it. Oh and the speaker wires.
The other ten minutes came from plugging all the power cords back in and routing them through the stand. The problem with my Z-Line glass stand is you can see ALL the wires behind it. Any one know a way to hide grand-central station of wires?
Anyways I powered it up and tried to play a movie. Conveniently, Avatar was already loaded in the bluray player so I just let it play. I fast forwarded to the scene where they blow the hell out of home tree and let it rip. Holy crap this receiver has power, but where was the bass? The front panel showed the sub was on, and so did the onscreen display. I played with it for five minutes wondering why my trusty Polk PSW150 sub wasn't firing off. Stupid me, I forgot to plug the sub cable into the receiver. Once I did the bass was back, but it was kind of disappointing. Nothing was shaking, the bass was barely felt. I decided to run the Audessey auto calibration at this point to maybe get some better sound.
The Audessey process is pretty cool, you get this odd shaped mic with a tripod mount that you put in your listening position(s) and run the setup. It sends out pings from all the channels first to see what speakers are actually hooked up. It correctly identified my setup as 5.1 instead of 7.1 or 9.1. I don't see any point in 7.1 anyways. After that it asks you to put the mic in your listening position 1 and runs some random noise through each speaker. I put the mic on a surveyors tripod and let it rip. The process measures the frequency response and time delay between all the speakers, so that it knows how big each speaker is, and how far it is from the user. It got each speaker down to the inch. The only problem is it set my center channel to 40hz and mains to 60hz. This means my front stage can put out a lot of bass by themselves, but it was odd the smaller center was measured as larger than the sides. Oh well, I reset them all to 80hz since this is a THX receiver and that is the normal THX setting. After it ran the tests, it took about 5 minutes to run its calculations and save the config.
I unpaused Avatar after this and it was amazing. The sound from the speakers was calibrated now and it was just like IMAX. But the bass was still missing. It was there but subdued. I hit some buttons on the remote and saw that the LFE/Sub was set at -15. Why did it set it so low? It must have thought my sub was way too loud. I set it to -5 and the house started to shudder like a tornado was approaching. Audio nirvana hit. 135 watts per channel, and near-reference levels of THX sound made it amazing.
The receiver gave my speakers a new lease on life. Not that the HK was bad, but the Onkyo has much more power (135w vs 50w). The HK will be fine in the bedroom. My Klipsch system sang to heights it had never seen before. The bass was tight, the treble was refined. I watched about 20 minutes of the movie and decided this one is a keeper, unless someone offers me more on Craigslist, hehe.
I hooked up the router to the receiver and let it do a firmware update. That took about 30 minutes, but at least it was automated. The HK unit took like four hours because you have to use a serial port and it has to do a bunch of random crap. After that I fired up the NET mode of the receiver, and it connected to Pandora. Logging in was a pain in the ass, as the remote has no keyboard and the onscreen keyboard was so slow. Thankfully you only have to do this once. I put Usher on and it sounded pretty good for internet compressed music. I need to get an SACD player some time and see how it sounds.
Highly recommended, especially for this price.
In the months of October and November I made more money selling the crap in our closets at home than I did working for Dell on my salary/wage. What does that mean? I sold a TON of high margin stuff. I just sold a DBX 4BX sound expander the other day for $225, and it only cost me $5 at Goodwill about 8 months ago. Most of my sales were like that. I was sitting on a gold mine and finally cashed it in.
So anyways, back to the topic at hand, something THX certified. In our home we have 3 systems you can watch movies on, one in the bedroom with my 46" LED, one in the middle living room with the 37" LCD, and one in the big living room with the 100" drop down high definition projector. Well my goal had been to upgrade all the systems eventually to HDMI with high definition codec decoding (DTS MasterHD, Dolby TrueHD, etc). So far I only had a mid-line Harman Kardon AVR254 7.1 HDMI receiver in the big living room. It's pretty damn good actually, but I've always wanted more. Don't forget my 10 year old Sony 555ES receiver that I sold for $200 as well, that's what started all this.
So, step 1 - make some money to buy a nice receiver. Well how do we make money, my thrifty pickers? Buy low and sell high. I perused the Best Buy auction site as usual, and craigslist, and Goodwill. In the end I bought two receivers for the time being, a Pioneer 820-K and 1019AH-K. Both were HDMI receivers, supporting 1080p and high def codecs. The 1019AH-K was last years model, 7.1 channel top of the line. It's identical to last years Pioneer Elite, sans the pre-outs and cool amber display. The 820-K is this years 5.1 HDMI 3D capable. Basically I paid about 100 for each one, as is coming only with the receiver. I used them in my bedroom and middle living room for a while.
Well the performance of them was unimpressive, so I sold them both. The 1019 sold for $225, and the 820k sold for $150. Not bad, I ended up with $375 made from $200. I also sold the Velodyne sub I bought at Goodwill, $200 on a $30 investment. So I decided to spend about $400 on a receiver, because Christmas is here and I didn't want to unload all my money on a receiver. I figured I'd get a mid line receiver, that was higher end than what I got from the Best Buy site. I looked around at Yamaha, Denon, Sony, and Onkyo. In the end I settled on the Onkyo TX-NR807 7.2 (9.2 with additional amps) Network receiver. It's last years $1100 HDMI receiver. The only thing it doesn't have is 3D capability. I could care less about that feature.
Well I ordered it refurbished from accessories4less.com and it arrived in 3 days. Cost? $429. I got the box with all the accessories and manual, and opened it up. It's in brand new shape. Not a single scratch on it. I seriously don't think this thing was ever used. It probably left the factory, was delivered and opened, and then returned. Well it saved me over $600 so I'm not complaining.
I was actually lazy this weekend, normally with a new toy of this magnitude I would have stopped any and everything I was doing to go hook it up. It wasn't until Sunday night that I decided to hook it up. I yanked all the wires out the back of my trusty HK AVR254 and put it to the side. Lately I've been on a kick of trying to clean up wires. I'm tired of having to twist speaker wires and stick them in the terminals, and screw it down. I bought a ton of Nakamichi banana plugs and I screwed them on the ends to make setup easier.
Anyways, the actual hookup of the receiver took about 30 seconds. 3 HDMI in (Bluray, Cable, HD-DVD) and 1 out (LCD/Projector) along with the power cord. That's it. Oh and the speaker wires.
The other ten minutes came from plugging all the power cords back in and routing them through the stand. The problem with my Z-Line glass stand is you can see ALL the wires behind it. Any one know a way to hide grand-central station of wires?
Anyways I powered it up and tried to play a movie. Conveniently, Avatar was already loaded in the bluray player so I just let it play. I fast forwarded to the scene where they blow the hell out of home tree and let it rip. Holy crap this receiver has power, but where was the bass? The front panel showed the sub was on, and so did the onscreen display. I played with it for five minutes wondering why my trusty Polk PSW150 sub wasn't firing off. Stupid me, I forgot to plug the sub cable into the receiver. Once I did the bass was back, but it was kind of disappointing. Nothing was shaking, the bass was barely felt. I decided to run the Audessey auto calibration at this point to maybe get some better sound.
The Audessey process is pretty cool, you get this odd shaped mic with a tripod mount that you put in your listening position(s) and run the setup. It sends out pings from all the channels first to see what speakers are actually hooked up. It correctly identified my setup as 5.1 instead of 7.1 or 9.1. I don't see any point in 7.1 anyways. After that it asks you to put the mic in your listening position 1 and runs some random noise through each speaker. I put the mic on a surveyors tripod and let it rip. The process measures the frequency response and time delay between all the speakers, so that it knows how big each speaker is, and how far it is from the user. It got each speaker down to the inch. The only problem is it set my center channel to 40hz and mains to 60hz. This means my front stage can put out a lot of bass by themselves, but it was odd the smaller center was measured as larger than the sides. Oh well, I reset them all to 80hz since this is a THX receiver and that is the normal THX setting. After it ran the tests, it took about 5 minutes to run its calculations and save the config.
I unpaused Avatar after this and it was amazing. The sound from the speakers was calibrated now and it was just like IMAX. But the bass was still missing. It was there but subdued. I hit some buttons on the remote and saw that the LFE/Sub was set at -15. Why did it set it so low? It must have thought my sub was way too loud. I set it to -5 and the house started to shudder like a tornado was approaching. Audio nirvana hit. 135 watts per channel, and near-reference levels of THX sound made it amazing.
The receiver gave my speakers a new lease on life. Not that the HK was bad, but the Onkyo has much more power (135w vs 50w). The HK will be fine in the bedroom. My Klipsch system sang to heights it had never seen before. The bass was tight, the treble was refined. I watched about 20 minutes of the movie and decided this one is a keeper, unless someone offers me more on Craigslist, hehe.
I hooked up the router to the receiver and let it do a firmware update. That took about 30 minutes, but at least it was automated. The HK unit took like four hours because you have to use a serial port and it has to do a bunch of random crap. After that I fired up the NET mode of the receiver, and it connected to Pandora. Logging in was a pain in the ass, as the remote has no keyboard and the onscreen keyboard was so slow. Thankfully you only have to do this once. I put Usher on and it sounded pretty good for internet compressed music. I need to get an SACD player some time and see how it sounds.
Highly recommended, especially for this price.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
THX Power, finally
So this is one of the few Craigslist deals I've picked up recently. I actually emailed this lady about her Insignia receiver for $100. She said it was a $500 receiver eight months ago. Well the only $500 receiver Insignia has is their HDMI capable one which for $100 is pretty good. Turns out it was just a NS2000 - Stereo receiver, which is $100 retail new. But she said she had an amp with it for sale, too. What was it? I asked. Parasound HCa-1205a.
What's that? It's a THX Ultra certified five channel amplifier. 140 watts into five channels RMS @ 8ohms. 200 watts into 4 ohms. That's one hell of an amplifier. I picked it up for $200 (cheap) and took it home. The guy said he had a candle on it and it kind of melted. No joke.
I got it home and opened it up. I wasn't going to power it on with wax caked to the top. I take the top cover off and bang the wax out. No big deal. Then I look inside and theres wax ALL over the toroidal transformer. I scrape it off, and out. It's everywhere. Luckily it's only on the transformer and not on any of the circuit boards, that would be a nightmare to clean. Overall I pulled about 18 oz of wax out of that thing. What type of candle was he burning?
After cleaning it up I hooked it up to my RT-55s and let her rip. POWER. Wow is there power. The good ole' NAD before was great, but this was moving.
Great power. Great price. Cleaned all up - paired with my RT-55's bi-amped (first time ever) and a Velodyne VA-810 subwoofer... Awesome.
Friday, August 6, 2010
This one really sucks....
And it's true! Hey readers it's been a long time since I last posted. Well I don't have any pictures for today's blog (wait, i found a stock one!), but I'll be sure to get some when I have time. I've been a bit busy and have 
sold off quite a bit of my inventory. That being said, I still have more than a closet full of audio gear that's got to go.
So today's story, about sucking.... I went to Goodwill last week and as usual there wasn't much to purchase, so I rounded the corners and on top of one of the higher racks was this big yellow thing that caught my eye. I looked up and saw this weird 'cyclone' looking yellow thing. I yank the handle and pull it down, and behold it's a Dyson DC07 vacuum cleaner. Yeah one of those $500 vacuums was sitting at Goodwill. Immediately I rolled it up to the front where the power plug was and plugged it in. It powered on with a terrific roar. I look under at the brush and it's not spinning. Damn, the belt must be broken or something. Still, the price tag reads $19.99 and it sucks, hard.
At the counter the usual girl tells me, " I told them to price it at $50, someone still would have bought it". Well I'm glad they didn't. I bought it, stuffed it in the trunk next to the subwoofer/amp that I bough at goodwill (another story...later) and went home.
So I bring it home and let it sit for a while, since I didn't really want to mess with it or the belt. The belt is $7 on ebay, and that's apparently the only place to get it. It sat in the same place for a day, then I remembered something about the Dysons - they don't turn the brush on until you lean the handle back and put it in gear! It's to save power for the hand wand and increase suction. I plugged bit Yellow in and leaned it back, behold the vacuum works! Sure, it's missing the hand wand tools, but the hand wand and extendable hose are built into the handle so it's got those at least.
I took it apart, flushed out all the old dust, and washed all the filters (which are hand washable!). After that this thing sucked even harder, which is amazing.
$19.99 for a Dyson, from Goodwill. I had hoped for one but gave up hoping long ago as these things never happen. Persistence paid off this time. And it sure does suck.
No resale on this one. $500 vacuum - $19.50 paid (discount) = $480.50 + tax saved.
sold off quite a bit of my inventory. That being said, I still have more than a closet full of audio gear that's got to go.So today's story, about sucking.... I went to Goodwill last week and as usual there wasn't much to purchase, so I rounded the corners and on top of one of the higher racks was this big yellow thing that caught my eye. I looked up and saw this weird 'cyclone' looking yellow thing. I yank the handle and pull it down, and behold it's a Dyson DC07 vacuum cleaner. Yeah one of those $500 vacuums was sitting at Goodwill. Immediately I rolled it up to the front where the power plug was and plugged it in. It powered on with a terrific roar. I look under at the brush and it's not spinning. Damn, the belt must be broken or something. Still, the price tag reads $19.99 and it sucks, hard.
At the counter the usual girl tells me, " I told them to price it at $50, someone still would have bought it". Well I'm glad they didn't. I bought it, stuffed it in the trunk next to the subwoofer/amp that I bough at goodwill (another story...later) and went home.
So I bring it home and let it sit for a while, since I didn't really want to mess with it or the belt. The belt is $7 on ebay, and that's apparently the only place to get it. It sat in the same place for a day, then I remembered something about the Dysons - they don't turn the brush on until you lean the handle back and put it in gear! It's to save power for the hand wand and increase suction. I plugged bit Yellow in and leaned it back, behold the vacuum works! Sure, it's missing the hand wand tools, but the hand wand and extendable hose are built into the handle so it's got those at least.
I took it apart, flushed out all the old dust, and washed all the filters (which are hand washable!). After that this thing sucked even harder, which is amazing.
$19.99 for a Dyson, from Goodwill. I had hoped for one but gave up hoping long ago as these things never happen. Persistence paid off this time. And it sure does suck.
No resale on this one. $500 vacuum - $19.50 paid (discount) = $480.50 + tax saved.
Monday, May 3, 2010
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
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Some rackmount goodness!
Well, it's been over a month since my last post. Such a long time. Now that doesn't mean I have neglected my thrifty ways, mind you!
Yesterday we went to the Oklahoma Arts Festival and took in the nice weather and the starving artists' works. It didn't last as long as I figured it would, since it's a pretty big event.
Anyways afterwards we went thrift hunting at the usual Goodwill stores. The intention was to let Rosey go find baby clothes for her best friend, who's pregnant with her first child. It just happens that Goodwill is also one of my favorite place(s) to go. We went to the one on SW 89th st and Penn first, since she didn't really look too much there last week. We walk in and she goes to get some clothes, and I do my walk back to see if that pair of Advent 1's were there from last week. I've read that they're some pretty awesome speakers, unfortunately one was water damaged and the cone on the woofer was disintegrated. It was probably a $5 fix for a $15 set of speakers that could easily bring in $150. They were there, and still marked at $15. I passed on them again, and went to their crappy electronics section. This store never has anything good.
The first thing that I spot is some weird rackmont piece that's silver. My eyes were blurry since I had my prescription sunglasses on (they're old) so I had to let them adjust. Instead of looking to see what it was, I just knelt down and grabbed it. Upon further inspection I saw the price tags for $10, so I didn't figure it was anything special. The front said "XTi 1000". Big whoop, some random off brand piece of hardware. Then the brand logo was revealed from under my hand: "Crown".
Really? A Crown amp sitting in Goodwill? And for ten dollars mind you. This thing was in excellent shape. I plugged it in, and it booted up (I say that for an amp because this one has an LCD). Great! Blinded by my thriftiness I just walked over to Rosey, told her what I found, and bolted for the register. I paid for it and put it in the trunk. We picked out baby clothing after that and left.
I didn't find much else, just some box called "Prozone". I'm guessing it's an ozone generator with a UV lamp inside. It now sits behind the kitty litter box.
Anyways we got home and I waited until the rain stopped to bring the amp insite. It really was in great shape as you can see from the picture above. Well I hooked it up, but realized this thing only takes balanced XLR plugs instead of the normal 1/4" Phono or RCA plug. The previous owner had ghetto-rigged a $.02 RCA cable into a cheapo XLR plug, but only did it with one. Well I guess I could test one channel at a time, which I did. I hooked it up to my B&W 2000's and well, it sounds pretty good. It's no NAD amp, but for how much power it puts out, it's certainly a clean one. The specs list .02% THD which is pretty good, with 275w per channel into 8ohms and 500w into 4 ohms, which is damn powerful. Price tag? $499, and it's still a current model!
Well now I'm on a quest for a decent set of XLR connectors, unless I use this with my new EMU 1212 sound card which has 1/4" TRS connectors. I'm positive they make TRS to XLR since they're both balanced.
But what about the black amp sitting underneath the Crown? That's a Behringer EP1500 amplifier that I picked up the day before, not knowing this Crown would come into my hands. I was going to use the Behringer with a passive subwoofer in my home theater, well I probably still will, unless the Crown does a better job. I've been eying this set of Polk Audio subwoofers that have their amplifiers removed but come with a beautiful ebony enclosure and dual 10" subwoofers with a power handling of 1000w rms. I'm thinking of getting two, wiring them to 2Ohms each, and driving 700w to each with the Crown, or the same with the Behringer.
I tested the Behringer the day before, it uses XLR and 1/4" inputs, which means I can use the 1/4" to RCA plugs I bought for my sound card. Sound quality? Great, along with punchy bass and tons of headroom. 260 watts per channel at 8 ohms, this amp is very similar to the Crown, at 1/3 the cost.
I like them both, we'll see if I flip them or not!
Crown Rating:
Price: $10
Status: Probably flip it
Condition: 5.00 Stars
Cost: .5 stars
Flippable: 4.5 Stars
Potential Income: $300-400
Behringer Rating:
Price: $100
Status: Keeper
Condition: 4.75 Stars
Cost: 2 Stars
Flippable: 3.00 Stars
Potential Income: $50
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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
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