What was the best value purchase you've made and why?

[Mrkropotkin]

If you want cheap improvement to sound then follow these steps... place your fingers on both hands together, place hands behind your ears and gently slide hands forward till your ears are slightly bent forward.  Now hear the improvement.  Currently working on a head band to facilitate this as it gets tiring after 2 min....enjoy  i will keep you posted... ; )

[MrBurns84]

Trip down memory lane with my first ever purchase of a pair of Kenwood floor stand speakers on specials for $199 which i knocked off $20 when i was at high school.  These were a three way with a 10 inch bass driver.  I was into HT, and so i asked the JB hifi sales guy after what he had in terms of surround amps and rears and if he could do a deal on something.  So he cut me a deal for a Pioneer 50w x 5 dolby surround receiver, and some jensen tripoles all for $650.  And threw in some speaker cables (cant remember how many meters).. but essentially was my first HT setup and journey into audio...   

[buddyev]

I abandoned vinyl a while ago and have been exclusively digital for few years apart from the occasional CD.  I have a decent digital collection and was happy with Audivarna but my brains trust convinced me to switch to Roon, not for playback or library improvements but for its convolution software. I was reluctant to be messing around any further with software but I’d have to say that it has been far and away the biggest bang for buck in my audio life.
At a certain stage you are grateful for small percentage improvements for your arm and leg spending, but a Roon subscription - $150 a year - has  been equivalent to spending several bucketloads on new speakers.

[Ratbob]

3, things for me

 

1, KEF 104.2 speakers, purchased new in 1985, I think they were $2,500. Ok, not cheap back then but I still enjoy them, probably still worth $750 so that’s great value over 36 years. (now being refurbished)

 

2. TEAC VRDS25 CD player. RRP $4,000. Circa 1997. Got it for less and expensive in the day but still enjoying it. Still worth a bit today I guess.

 

What makes these great value for me is learning that sometimes you just gotta spend to get what you truly want and when you’ve got exactly what you wanted, you’re less likely to keep changing and getting into the spending more and keeping less cycle. But hey, that’s the fun part.

 

oh and number 3

My first Australian HiFi magazine. Taught me heaps about the basics and improvements that can be gained for free, speaker placement, isolation, arm/cartridge set up etc, best bang for buck and now we get it all for free in this fab forum, pretty lucky eh.

[Pigpen]

ME1500 power amplifier - paid $7990 in October 1987.

 

Sold it in 2012 for $6000.

 

Total loss over nearly 25 years = $1990 or roughly $79.60 per year.

[sir sanders zingmore]

I had posted this but I guess it was in the “lost window” of posts that got deleted in the great hack of ‘21. 
 

Two best value purchases for me:

 

-Topping D10 DAC: got me off the DAC-of-the-month merry go round. Saved me a fortune. 

-BACCH4Mac crosstalk cancellation software. Apart from the speakers themselves this has been hands down, the biggest single improvement to my system (soundstage, instrument separation, tonality, realism). Easily paid for by selling my more expensive dacs 

[Tone Malone]

A pair of Beyer Dynamic headphones, bought for $50 off a fellow student back in my senior school years when I was a boarder. I had an Onkyo CD player and played it through a ghettoblaster (no prizes for guessing the weak link in the system!). But the headphones were great, and kept me going until I had more space (and money) to buy better components. 

Edited May 4, 2021 by Tone Malone
Text error

[Cloth Ears]

On 24/04/2021 at 5:01 PM, Luc said:

Four Au-2900's and three Au-4900's all bought in one foul swoop on Gumtree for peanuts. They all sold for good bucks and they got me an LP12.

Au-7900 bought for $228 at a Tender centre just sold it for $1100 and it's helping finance either a new amp or a new cart.

 

And in keeping with the OP's original thoughts then I'd name the LP12 late model table for $1700 a bargain, with Cirkus and Ittok and Denon DL-304 LOMC. Still dining out on those Sansui's

Sansui AU-X1 for $5 on Ebay. Yes, it was broken and cost $200 in parts/labour to get it fixed up, but it was the best integrated I've owned. Unfortunately, it was the early model that was prone to oscillation, so when it went again (about 5-6 years later), I put it up for sale and got $800 in broken state.

 

So, best value purchase in more ways than one!

[brodricj]

PS Audio used to sell to me direct at wholesale, anything I wanted, which was very generous of them. Sooner or later everything broke down, I had it repaired under warranty, and I sold it in working order for what I paid for it. So they were all no-cost turnovers. I no longer get that crazy good deal, and I've since moved on to Esoteric products and haven't had a single break down in 3 years thus far. Except for a PS Audio powerplant which has broken down twice now, but PS Audio has been generous enough to cover out-of-warranty repair for me at no cost. Gotta be happy with that, but I'd rather the stuff wasn't prone to breaking down in the first place. I'm very happy with the Esoteric product.

[dcathro]

16 hours ago, Pigpen said:

ME1500 power amplifier - paid $7990 in October 1987.

 

Sold it in 2012 for $6000.

 

Total loss over nearly 25 years = $1990 or roughly $79.60 per year.

 

You could calculate that differently:

 

$7990 according to shadowstats would be over $120,000 today, and the $6000 in 2012 would be about $14000 today. So in todays money a cost of over $4k a year.

 

Alternatively the $6000 in 2012 equates to about $1000 in 1987 dollars, so 200 1987 dollars a year.

 

Edited May 5, 2021 by dcathro

[Cloth Ears]

9 minutes ago, dcathro said:

 

You could calculate that differently:

 

$7990 according to shadowstats would be over $120,000 today, and the $6000 in 2012 would be about $1400 today. So in todays money a cost of over $4k a year.

 

Alternatively the $6000 in 2012 equates to about $1000 in 1987 dollars, so 200 1987 dollars a year.

 

I think you mean $19,000, don't you? And that's in the US...not here.

[Jodie 66]

Brought a pair of Audio definition STATIS speakers in great condition for $900 and $ 10’000 when new I love them and are definitely keepers

[RankStranger]

I was buying a 10yo rotel amp from gumtree and the guy offered to throw in a "broken" 70s rotel amp which I thought I could play with and maybe get going. 
 

it sat untested in my garage for the better part of a year before I plugged it in and it just worked beautifully. Ran it for days and it never missed a beat. All I did was replace 2 x 50c globes behind the VU meters, dusted it off, chucked it on eBay and it sold for over 600 bucks!

[Sansui77]

Got too many deals in the past. It's my little secret

Edited May 6, 2021 by Sansui77

[BLAH BLAH]

Really not fussed about the timing factor...nice wallet wise if it happens...but then if your patient you catch up eventually...what comes round goes around...it's always been about the 'want' factor for me...(within reason!  )

Years ago when the aussie dollar reached the magnificent high of $1.15us I lucked onto a minty pair of rarish Sansui SP-5000 speakers from the states...after much humming and hawing I pulled the trigger and from memory they co$t me around $500 (Ebay) and then another $200 to import...came beautifully wrapped up with cardboard and heavy duty shrink plastic on a mini wooden pallet and survived the trip undamaged and not a mark on the packaging...bloody heavy as, took the two of us to unload them from the back of the ute and carry the pallet inside the house.

Then I decided also to have them serviced and recapped to bring them up to spec sound wise...they were over 40 years old...time to refresh! 

Cost me around another $300 plus the long car trips to the Tech's home. Here they are being serviced...

 

The crossover upgrade and internal acoustic treatment has improved the quality of sound, high frequencies are more refined, mids are cleaner and the bass is lower and tighter.

After the service they just sounded superb hooked up to my various Sansui Amps...just a warm analogue sound with just the right amount of clean detail to pull them out of cloying lushness...loud!!! and with an efficiency of 104db...very happy! Not sure if I will ever let these go...

[surprisetech]

The best value purchase I've ever made is my Technics SL-D303 Turntable.  It's now vintage, but was purchased new in 1981.

I was still an apprentice & money was tight, but I was convinced that cheaper TTs were not a good investment. 

So I patiently saved up and then took advantage of a run out sale of Technics products at Tivoli Hifi.  (I was so impressed with how I was treated by Phillipe, that I went back and purchased a Sansui Receiver about 6 months later).

I replaced the stock cart straight away with a Philips GP412 hyper-elliptical thanks to the generous staff shop discounts we has access to at the time.

It has been in constant use for 40 years with a drop of sewing machine oil on the spindle every boxing day, some contact cleaner/lubricant on the switches about every 10 years and a couple of cart upgrades.

Cover hinges were replaced with some DIY aluminium ones and the controller chip had to be replaced about 15 years ago. 

Other than that it has just kept purring along, & with the addition of a Cartridge alignment protractor and a Michel record clamp, has never given me reason to wish for something newer.

Hinges aside, just a great piece of 70s/80s Japanese engineering.

I have other equipment that I consider to be great value purchases, but how could they compete with that?

[Ruffter]

I once bought a Linn LP12 at the local second hand shop for $60 here in Darwin. At the time I was a full-time uni student, with three kids under three and a mortgage, all on my wife's middle of the road income. I flipped it for a tidy profit ($900), and it helped put food on the table. Now six years down the track, on two wages and with a lot less to worry about, and I kick myself for selling it but still know that it helped immensely at the time.

 

Cheers,

Andrew