Hi Fi Audio Deals

This was a bit of a walk down memory lane: as I was searching for deals today, I came across this write-up on “the world’s smallest walkman” — I had forgotten that I actually owned one of these for about three months in 1983 (after returning it to the store multiple times for a replacement, I gave up and bought an Aiwa cassette player which refused to die — but which has since been lost).  This was probably the first audio product I spent any appreciable amount of money on, and I recall it being both incredibly exciting (it really was quite an engineering marvel) and incredibly disappointing (it would break if you looked at it wrong). After that, I didn’t buy another Sony product for 20 years (I finally succumbed in 2003 and bought a flat screen Trinitron that weighs about 250 pounds — and which still works as well as the day I bought it).

Noticed that Amazon was acting strangely today — it’s being reported that they are experiencing problems.

There is an excellent write up on the relative merits of “designer” vs generic speaker cable by Roger Russell, Director of Acoustic Research at McIntosh Laboratory, Inc. His conclusion: so long as the cable is copper, is the right guage (based on length of wire and nominal impedance of speakers), and has decent insulation, performance should be equivalent between expensive and cheap cable. Thanks to D. League at the Amazon.com Speakers Forum for pointing out this link. (originally posted 2/14/10)

I may be late to the game on figuring this out, but I was setting up a system in our basement last night, and in the course of having to consult the AT&T U-verse site for instructions on how to program the remote for an older denon receiver, I found that AT&T has activated "Media Sharing" on its U-verse boxes. It took me about 10 minutes to get it working, and now I have access to all the music ripped onto our music server/desktop on all four tuner boxes. The interface is limited — you can scroll through lists of either albums or artists, and then select individual songs from there (or you can access play-lists made on your pc). No ability to make playlists from the tv. Still, I've been pretty impressed so far. Here are instructions for setting up your system in Windows XP, and in Vista. If you have U-verse in your area, it’s one more reason to consider switching over (we’ve had it for about a year, and have been very pleased so far — we had previously had comcast and before that directv).

FYI: I typically don’t list deals from merchants whose ratings indicate a low level of customer satisfaction. For instance, ecost.com (just as an example), although it often has very low listed prices on electronics, currently has a rating on resellerratings.com under 4 (out of 10). As a result, I don’t typically consider ecost (again, just an example) when determining who has the best deal on a product. Likewise, for merchants listing their wares through Amazon.com or Ebay.com, I consider the reported satisfaction level, and typically exclude merchants with little or no feedback. An exception to the general rule will be made if I’ve personally ordered from a merchant and found them to provide good service (I recognize that some merchants get negative feedback from particularly difficult customers — I try to read the feedback comments to get a sense of what people are complaining about).

Let me know if you’ve had a particularly good or bad experience buying audio equipment from a merchant (especially when that experience doesn’t comport with the consensus view as listed on resellerratings.com or other sites).

If an item is exceptionally cheap (i.e., under $20 shipped, and at a price significantly lower than anywhere else), I may list it anyway, though I may shy away from listing more expensive products from the same seller.