Thrift store finds?


Your experiences on any thrift store finds?

I just snagged a Technics SL-PS70 CD player for $5.50 Cdn. the other day. Brought it home took the cover off to see under the hood and it was clean and nicely built inside. Wiped the dust off the unit and fired it up. Was not expecting much from it as my feelings on MASH dacs were low in expectations. But low and behold, she sounds pretty nice. Good etching of vocals and instruments, fairly deep soundstage, a nice rounding of notes, not tinny or edgy, not a ton of air in sound but a pretty nice sounding machine.

I like its brawny build. It's got a nice display that can be switched off, gold plated jacks and even a digital out. I dug out some old cony of mags and found it to be a rather pricey unit for 1990-91 between $600 and $800 Cdn brand new. The old Canadian Sound and Vision mag of the day had two of their four editors pick it as a critic's choice pick for 1991 in the $500-$800 range.

Anyways for $5.50 a nice higher end Made in Japan player of the day.

Comment and / or your thrift store finds?
les_creative_edge
I usually find at least one pig who has to have all of the records until he lets you see them.
Recently a thrift store staffer bought out a new movers box full of LPs. 100 or more. I started to go through them. When this jerk has the audacity or the balls if you prefer, to look me in the face and say to me "I am taking all those" he had not looked at a single disc. I said you can't sell every scratched to death time life music of the 50s record on ebay. The guy then denied that he was a flipper.
I don't flip but I would if there was something I thought anything was worthy of the effort. Why are they invariably ashamed to say sure I flip. This is how I make enough extra money to get by. I never have seen a sign which says Flipping not allowed. I said to him-you don't have that many hours to listen to them all. His response I throw them out if I don't like them.
I wanted the sales clerk to complete the transaction in front of me.
new point
I will say there are some interesting medium value pieces fairly often, of late I picked up a Sony reel to reel intact with unused 60s style mike. Another non flipper asked me casually if there was anything in the audio trash heap . They have a pretty solid Sansui TT but get this the TT still has the OEM Sansui cartridge. He brush it off. I came back and he was scrambling to take the head shell off.
Mechans,

If a guy like that did that to me, I'd say you can grab the box AFTER I go through it as I saw no name on it nor saw it in your hands before I started to look through it.

On another note a couple of other thrift buys...

A technics M258R cassette deck. for $5.00 Cdn. A nice 1981-82 auto reverse deck but with fixe heads one in each direction. Nice unit only needed tweaking of left channel output.

A JVC AX-4 Integrated amp of about 1981 era. Work perfectly. Paid $18.00 Cdn.
The Goodwills in Austin (and Houston) now have employees that recognize good gear and records and if they don't take them for themselves they put them in a bid case which quickly gets out of hand. I have given up on the "chain" thrift stores and found more gold at the mom and pop outfits, especially in the surrounding smaller communities.

As for my best find audiowise, other than a slew of turntables which I did fix up and flip when I was working in a record store in the mid 90's (pre-ebay) my best find was a pair of KLH 20s for $5 and some Pioneer HPM 60s (tweeter was blown in one) for about the same price.

As for the guy saying he was going to buy them, I would have gone to the manager and offered an amount for all of them and see if the guy could match it right then and there (assuming there was some good stuff in there). $50 would probably have done it. On a similar note, Half Price Books was notorious for having the employees take the best stuff (I have several friends who still work there and they use to get some killer rare stuff for cheap). A while back mgmt got wise and now they limit their hold bins and the amount they can purchase. They can also "check" items out which they take home and copy. The quality of their stock has gone up immensely.
Just bought a pair of Infinity Qb speakers for $16 at Goodwill. They were marked to sell invidually for $8 each, but I splurged. I set them up in place of my Wilson MAXX-2's and, started wondering which pair I should keep. They sounded that good!
I didn't need them, don't want them, and, now, they're sitting in my house and I'm trying to give them away to someone. A friend said he'd take them, but that was a week ago and he still hasn't picked them up.