Friday, April 25, 2014

An Affordable Yamaha Stereo Receiver

When I was in college, my room mate had a nice Yamaha stereo. It sounded really good and was the highest quality stereo receiver in my circle of friends. Over the years, Yamaha musical instruments and studio mixers have been the choice of professional musicians.
By Housing Works Thrift Shops (Flickr: Yamaha Mini Grand Keyboard) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Today, Yamaha still makes high quality stereo components. The Yamaha Natural Sound line of stereos looks like a great choice for anyone who demands quality at a reasonable price. In particular, the Yamaha R-S201BL is available at an attractive entry-level price point.

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

The Sherwood RX-4109 Receiver is Haunting Me

I've been playing around with a bedroom stereo system.  I've got little stereos.  I've got thrift store specials.  But, none of them really fits the bill.  So, I keep searching on Amazon and looking for something else.  I can't buy it now.  But, I can look at it.  That's why this stereo seems to be in every advertisement I see.  It's the Sherwood RX-4109 2-Channel Stereo Receiver.  It's a basic no frills receiver that looks like it will completely fit the bill.


Traditional stereo sound at a nice price. It might go very well with my record player!

Sunday, April 13, 2014

Sony MDR-ZX100 Headphones Are A Good Buy!

Have you been trying out all the premium headphones on the market lately?  Have you tried the Bose headphones and the SMS headphones and the Beats?  Have you tried the Sennheisers?  There are a lot of nice headphones to audition.  However, before you audition anything, you have to buy some baseline headphones.  I recommend Sony MDR-ZX100 Headphones. These headphones have nice overall sound and clear vocals. They also cost less than $20. The main drawback is that they have a relatively short 47 1/4-inch cord. You'll want an extension for use with a stereo. You may find that you are happy with inexpensive Sony headphones and don't need to spend more. That is the essence of a successful dirt cheap audio buy!

Sunday, April 6, 2014

The Best and Worst of My 77 Cent Vinyl Albums

When vinyl record albums are cheap, you can experiment and take some risks. So far, I've bought less than a dozen vinyl LPs. Most of the albums that I have purchased have been classical music. But, don't worry. I'm not going to get all snooty. My primary criteria for buying a classical record is that it "kick ass." If you can't fire rockets from a helicopter and level a third world village to the music, I don't want it.


Using that criteria, so far, I like the soundtrack to the old movie: "Blue Max." At least, the album cover is kick ass!


My worst album I've bought so far was the "Smokey and the Bandit II" soundtrack. First of all, it's country and second of all it's for a movie sequel so the music is very derivative. One song is a total rip-off of "Southbound and Down" from the original movie.

In truth, I bought this album on the same day as my record player.  I needed a disc to see if it would work. At least, it wasn't Lawrence Welk and it wasn't scratched.