I found the graveyard of boomboxes!

There's a lot of plastic-fantastic but some cool stuff is also in the corners. Too bad the guy has no clue on the equipment. Anybody remember when old member ARKAY used to talk about the huge electronics markets he'd go to on the way home from work but he never posted a single photo? I imagine they looked liked this. Now I know where that Marantz is hiding!

 

Out of all of those boomers, that one looks mint! With my baggage allowance I bet I could grab a few of those and a turntable or two and pay for my plane ticket. Another angle I'm working is they love USA Industrial Stuff from the 50s-70's, I've grabbed some cool drafting lights and equipment at the local flea markets, I might take it over there and do a swap, it goes for big dollars now a days.

 

The Mazinger Z is worth some change, some of my older photos have my set in them...

I'll have to look again for the RX-DT75, I didn't see it...

 

Is it the one on top of the Marantz?

 

This is one of ARKAY's Threads from 2008, he couldn't post photos so we never saw his equipment but he described shops like these in Hong Kong all of the time. He found grails every week but outside of this forum, most of us had no idea about all of these wonderful units, most of this was brand new. I imagine he was hitting very similar shops and every once in awhile the good stuff would show up. Radiohier has the famous wall of boomboxes and rents them out, he used to be on here all of the time back then and did confirm ARKAY had a ton of grail boxes, we may never know what happened to them...
http://www.radiohier.com/home.html


Okay, maybe that title was a bit over-dramatic... but I bought another boombox today. Just one. That isn't such a big thing, just one boombox...

But it's after buying three yesterday, and several more over the previous few days. SO, I REALLY, REALLY decided ONLY to buy the best, rarest or most "holy" 'grails', only the ones I KNEW I WANTED, not just some interesting or semi-uncommon but ordinary ones. Otherwise, at rate they've been accumulating, I'll have no room to inhale or exhale in my apartment, even before summer comes!

So tonight I RESISTED a bunch of them. Among the ones I saw but didn't get were things like a Sanyo M7950K, ITT Polo Cassette 109-L, a JVC RC-545W, a Sharp GF-6262, an AJ-420 FS, and many more I didn't bother to write down the numbers of. I was doing well at resisting, until...

I got ONE box tonight. Just had to. It's one I already have, too. The one I already had/have has a double value for me; I like it for two reasons:

(1) I wanted one from the moment I saw it on the Boombox Museum pages, but I almost missed it when it was in front of me, because I didn't recognize it as the same box! The one on the website had microphones attached; the one "in the wild" did NOT, so I almost didn't realize it was the same box...

...EXCEPT for the lucky fact that RADIOHIER was visiting Hong Kong, and was with me at the time. He pointed at it and told me I should get it, that it was a rare, early box, and if I bought it, I wouldn't regret it.

Of course, he was right! Only after I got it and came home with it and looked it up, did I realize that I had bought one of my most-wanted boxes! I owe that to RADIOHIER, and every time I look at the box, I think of his visit and the good time we had "hunting" together.

(2) The second reason I like that box is that it has the original decal/sticker on the cassette door. RADIOHIER said he had seen several (maybe eleven or so) in different cities in the world, but had never seen one that still had the original sticker. I've searched online, but never seen another like that, either, so it is a "special" box, a rarity within a fairly rare box type.

Otherwise, the box was dirty but cleaned up pretty nicely. Some parts, like the steel "feet", needed some real polishing to look decent again.

Well, the box I got tonight was, as you've realized by now, another M-9998K, this time withOUT the sticker, too... but in VERY GOOD condition. It looks remarkably new for its age. I found only ONE scratch on it, very slight and shallow, but several inches long, on the right side. I'm not sure if the scratch is removable or not, but I think not quite. Beyond that, it is pretty clean and shiny. A quick-and-simple cleaning will make it look better than my other one, so I'll probably swap around the cassette doors to put the decal on the best box, and maybe swap a few knobs, if apprpriate (cheating, I know...).

So I only got one box tonight, and it was a duplicate... but I'm not unhappy about it, AT ALL! ...just thinking I have to STOP getting one good box a day like this ...365 boxes after just a year is UNTHINKABLE for me! But if I had the same chance tomorrow, I'd STILL get that box, all over again. It's a good one!

 

He went over to AudioKarma.org and concentrated more on component stereos. He always said he didn't have a ton of room to store all of them, I wonder what happened to them? There was a few of you guys in the early days that had a ton of the cool boxes, I was just reading an old thread from baby.boomer, he had 100's, I got my boombox/Walkman Education from you guys, I never knew all this cool stuff existed when I was a kid, we just had the department store stuff.

Unfortunately I think most of these countries have the same issue, cool equipment but very limited room so there's not a lot of buyers.

 

Radio, here's how I search the site, it brings up the new forum and the "forum reader"

Type this in the google search engine "litfan, site:stereo2go.com" and the following page will pop up.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=litfan,+site:stereo2go.com
The first word is for your search, if you do something like Big Bad Boombox, put all of the words in quotes otherwise it will search for all of the words individually.

When the big cool super-rare boomboxes are searched using the same method, the same 5-6 guys pop up (you are one of them). I think the forum reader only goes back to 2008 so the really early forum stuff from 2001-2007 is gone forever.

I want to believe that most of these sellers have zero interest in the internet and and bigger problem is the size of the homes, they have to be really scrupulus about what they can keep around. In the end the homeowner gives the shopkeeper the old electronics, the shopkeeper sells it. ARKAY used to say a lot of it would get thrown in containers and shipped to Africa if he didn't move fast enough. He also said homeowner space was one consideration and they all wanted the newest gear, 10 years ago vintage wasn't on the radar over there.

 

Here's the first forum, there's tiny bit of stuff but most of the links are broken.....
https://web.archive.org/web/20040405043838/http://frost.bbboy.net/boombox

For some reason it's down right now...