Record Recycling: Great Vinyl from the Thrift Store

Someone donated a fantastic vinyl record collection to Goodwill.  The collection featured great groups like Earth, Wind, and Fire.  I found Jazz masters like Thelonious Monk and Cannonball Adderly.  I recognized familiar blues kings like Albert Collins, Robert Cray, and Johnny Copeland collaborating on an album.  I picked up household names like Lou Rawls. Even Gladys Knight and the Pips were in the stacks of old vinyl.

These aren't the Eighties icons that formed the mainstays of my music collection.  But, I recognized some great groups.  When I get home, I'll get to listen to them.  So whomever you are who donated to Goodwill, thanks for making your donation and thanks for sharing your music.  It will play on!

An Old School Stereo for Less than $30

Are you looking to get a stereo cheap?  A few weeks ago, I came across a couple of interesting stereo components that could have led me to the construction of a pretty nice sub-$30 old school stereo.

First, in a Goodwill in the far flung suburbs of Atlanta, I found two stereo receivers for $24.99 each.  The first component  was a Sherwood RX-4100 receiver.  It's a 105 watt 2-channel stereo unit with 0.05 THD distortion.  The Sherwood RX-4100 Stereo Receiver received mixed reviews on Amazon.com due primarily to the lack of tone controls.  If you need a manual for this stereo receiver it can be found on manualslib.com. 

Sherwood RX-4100 Stereo Receiver

The second component was an Insignia 200 watt stereo reciever.  Insignia is well known as the house brand of Best Buy.

Finally, a solitary Lxi brand single-disc CD player was selling just down the aisle for just under $4.  Of course, the $20,000 question remains:  will a $4 CD player work?  It did power on and off.  The door also opened and closed.  A simple CD player from Goodwill just might work.  It's the multi-disc CD players that get clunky.

 

That's a lot of stereo for $29.  Of course, speakers are another matter.  However, I've often seen mondo speakers for as low as $20 a pair.  Small bookshelf speakers could go for as little as $10.  As long as you can see that there are no tears in a speaker cone and that the foam surrounds around a speaker are intact, you almost can't go wrong with speakers from a thrift store.  However, there are also some great speaker deals on the Internet.

We live in an era when any resourceful kid can put together a great stereo.  We are lucky to be living in the twilight of a golden age of stereo technology.

Saying Goodbye to CD Jewel Cases

We recently accomplished something major.  We got rid of all of our CD jewel cases.  We transferred each CD and CD cover pamphlet into a couple of CD portfolio cases.

The tough part of the project was alphabetizing all of the CDs and getting CD paperwork into the portfolio.  Here is my advice for organizing CDs in this manner:

1. Get all of your CDs together in one place.
2. Get a storage portfolio for each genre of music.
3.Divide your CDs by genre and alphabetize them consistently.
4. Start filing.  You may want to start jotting down the tunes for each CD onto a notecard to file with each disc.
5. Once you've filed all your CDs into portfolios, go thrugh ypur stack of jewel cases and make sure you didn't miss any double CDs or important pamphlets.

Once you're done, dump all the empty jewel cases into a recycling bin.