Tonight when going around the audio market, I saw a woman with a push-cart piled with mostly junk, but sticking out was a familiar-looking divided-square horn-style tweeter. Yep, it was a JVC RC-M70W! I asked her about it, and she was anxious to show me it worked, first. She pulled the power cord out of a bag, and borrowing a socket from a nearby shop, demonstrated that it was working before charging me (get this!) a whole ten bucks for it! I almost felt guilty paying that sum, but she was happy with the sale and I don't really want to "educate" the market too much.
I was pretty happy, and I REALLY appreciated the way she tried to give such good service to make a modest sale, but inside part of me was a little disturbed to realize that I wasn't really as happy as I was when I got my first M70. The thrill is not gone by any means, but it seemed a bit lessened; I wouldn't say I'm getting jaded, but diminishing returns do kick in as you get several of something. Or maybe I'm just a little tired, or maybe it's the coolness and that almost-raining, slight drizzle that makes you feel wet without actually being rained on. Whatever the cause, I realize I just don't quite feel as happy as I think I "should" at getting an M70.
Carrying the new M70 with me, glancing at it often while going around the market, I suddenly hear one Pakistani guy calling out to me, "Friend! Friend! You buy big radio-cassette?" He holds his hands out at least three feet wide, and I say, "Let's go take a look!" As I follow him off to his upstairs storage-space to see this monstrously big box, I'm thinking,"Please, God, not another ordinary GF-777... let it be something good and special and fun!" I fantasize that maybe it's a Japanese variant of the 777, or a mint Conion...surely it wouldn't be a Jumbo, would it?
I follow him down the street and upstairs to the place. He offers me a seat, then walks back through a doorway, down a hall and disappears around a corner. A moment later he comes back with a big, black, thing ... sadly, not a good black blaster, but a more modern elongated egg-ended monstrosity I have no interest in. No, thanks! Then he goes back and brings out another big, long eggy black thing, like some small dinosaur's turd, wrapped in plastic as if to contain the smell...Uh, no thanks!
Then he comes out with a 1990s 3-piece mid-sized home stereo thing I wouldn't want for free...
Wait just a minute, this is getting ridiculous!
I can see him parading the whole back room past me, box by box, one at a time, wasting his and my time and energy, only to have me get tired of saying "No, thanks" and losing all my hunting time doing it, so I suggest he just let me go back and look for myself.
He agrees, so I follow him back, snaking through the halls, ducking under low-hanging ceiling beams and past a kitchen space and up three steps into the back storage space. A bunch of junk there, with just ONE "classic" style box, one of those Phillips with the large center woofer. I end up buying that one, again for ten bucks. It has a few minor cosmetic issues. Why I even get it I'm not sure, since I have two already and barely want one at most, but I guess I'm rescuing it for eventual resale to a collector somewhere who will appreciate it. I put it with a D-8443 I bought from them recently, for pickup together in a few days. With the other things I have stashed waiting for transport, I might need two van-loads, I muse, as I don't like to risk scratches by stacking for transport.
Then I go back out into the streets, and almost exactly where the lady I bought the M70 from had been standing, is another lady --this one a few years younger, with dull, red-dyed hair, who would almost be attractive if not for the sour, "been around the block" look on her face. She, too, has a trolley-cart piled with stuff, and near the top is a Sanyo M-9994K, the dark-grey kind with the swivel tweeters. Not a bad box. I'm prepared to repeat the earlier M70 experience, but no, this would turn out differently...
The box looks pretty new and shiny, quite a nice example of that model box, so I ask her how much it is, and she asks me how much I'll pay for it. I offer ten bucks, and acting quite insulted, she says I am CRAZY and turns her cart away from me, waving me away with one hand as if to say, "Go away and stop wasting my time, you jerk!".
So her Sanyo is worth more than the JVC? Hhhmmm.... Being thick-skinned and persistent, I say, "Well, how much do you want for it?" and she responds, "At least forty dollars!" Now it's my turn to tell her she's crazy, and I walk away. I think to myself that maybe a few hours or days later, when no one has paid her price and she realizes I'm not so crazy after all, I'll ask again and get it for my price. She's in the wrong location to get her kind of price, and I know it.
I go around looking for a while, finding not very much. There is a GF-8080 which catches my eye for a moment, and can't remember if that one is rare, so I make a mental note to look it up when I get home. See some interesting huge Polk Audio speakers I'll want to look up, and have a couple interesting conversations with people, but find nothing really special. Not like yesterday, but that was an unusually good day for hunting.
Perhaps the best thing is that one wholesaler offers to sell me two nice steel racks (for putting gear on in my storage room) for a pretty reasonable price. I'll probably go back and get them soon, to stack the new boxes on. I muse on what it means when finding racks for the boxes pleases me as much as finding the boxes themselves does. But it's okay, I'm still pretty psyched up by yesterday's find of Marantz amps (3250b +300dc) that I'll pick up tomorrow. Can't stop thinking about those!
About two hours elapses, and just as I'm thinking of heading home, I happen to pass by the same lady with the Sanyo again in another location, and she has just shown the box to someone else, who walked away. Figuring it wouldn't hurt to ask again, I go over and say, "How much is it now, lowest price?" She says, "Twenty five bucks!" ...but two minutes later it is mine for about twelve bucks, a little bit more than I intended to pay, but an okay price for the shape it is in. It might clean up better than my current best one, and I shouldn't lose money on a resale, so it's okay with me. I like the looks of this box, which means a lot to me.
I walk away from the market area, heading down the street in the cool, dark, slightly drizzly but not-quite-raining weather, and ponder how I got to this state, where I am drawn back to the hunt again and again, but where sometimes the kills bring great joy, and other times just a sense of "I wonder why I did this? Did I really need another of these M70s? Of course not, so why did I bother?"
... but I know I'll be back there again, soon. I'll buy more boxes, probably even more M70s when I see them. I'll buy those shelves to put them on, too. I'll eventually sell some of them, perhaps most of them. So why do this? I don't know. I think perhaps it is genetic; perhaps my hunter-gatherer distant ancestors survived in part because they liked the act of walking around, looking, hunting, gathering, and perhaps that instinct has been passed down through the centuries to me.
Back then they sought leaves, fruit, nuts, fish and game to eat. Today it is Sanyos, Sharps and JVCs to enjoy that are the targets, but in principle it is the same: they passed on the instinct to go out and search, to find, to accumulate one's finds and hoard them against the long winters, and perhaps I am nothing more than the product, the prisoner if you will, of those genes.
I get home to the warmer, drier comfort of my familiar, lit-up apartment, and I look at the Sanyo that I carried home with me, and my mood lifts. The outing was worth it, and I DO appreciate another M70! Thank you, kind first lady who took pains to demonstrate that your wares worked. I'll even thank the red-haired lady and forgive her for calling me crazy, because she is probably right! Most of all, thank you, ancestors. I'm a hunter-gatherer, too, after all.
Ha ha! We are all crazy!! Nicely written post there Arkay, I enjoyed reading it.
Nice story arkay. I think you are right about that hunter-gatherer thing. The feeling that you get when you find something that you REALY want to find might be a surviving behaviour, which made us want to find more food for our species survival
As someone who doesn't post much, I would like to say how much I enjoy reading Arkay's stories. I would probably be buried in boom boxes if I lived there! Keep them coming.
you're gettin slightly tyred of getting m70,s and discribe the 777 as ordinery dont get me rong i love reading you're posts and you say it is possibly down to instinct that you go out searching for theese but this begs the question how many of us are in this game just because of the monetry value!!!, i mean before theese radios became valuable hardly any one bothered and this is aimed at all you readers not just at arkay and its not meant to offend, congrats on you're fine pickups arkay
No offence taken, and I think you raise a valid point. I collect for a variety of motivations, all mixed together. Money is ONE part of the whole ball of spaghetti.
Part of it is because I do think these things are neat for what they are. I would want a few, even if they had no market value, just to look at and sometimes to listen to.
There is also an element of nostalgia involved; they remind me of a past part of my life.
There is also the fun of seeking out the rare, a bit like those treasure-hunting sandbox games at carnivals when you are a little kid. The hunt and occasionally the "find" provides a kind of thrill, an sense of satisfaction or achievement/reward. But finding the same reward repeatedly becomes less motivating after enough repetition.
The money value IS ALSO A FACTOR, no doubt. Eveyone probably likes the feeling of getting something for well below what it is "worth". It makes you feel a little like you just won a lottery, but it's better than casino gambling or lottery tickets, because you don't lose money trying to chase that feeling. That is also tied in to that whole "treasure hunt" feeling.
That said, it isn't just money, or I would be more aggressively selling these off. Truth be told, I like owning them more than selling them; I do plan to sell off a bunch, but while I look forward to getting some money back (I'm not that rich, so the money matters to me) it will be hard for me to see them go. I like collecting more than selling/trading. That's just me. But I can't keep collecting without eventually selling some, and I don't want to sell at a loss, so money has to be a factor.
As for "getting a little tired of" M70s or 777s, it is only because I actually am finding these regularly. I was genuinely thrilled to get the first ones, but once you have several and your storage space is limited, you have to stop and ask, "Do I really want to get ANOTHER one?" In these cases, I still enjoy the fact that I FOUND one, but I don't need to own it, because I already have one.
I could buy it just for resale, and in some cases I want to do that, not just for money but because I like the idea of "saving" these from ending up in some poor 3rd world country where they will probably be used and abused to death. If I buy and re-sell to a collector, I know they will be taken care of and preserved. I feel good that I can help "save" some of these neat old boxes.
That is as much a motivation as the money, because I honestly don't relish the time spent getting packing materials, taking pics, posting or listing and selling it, packing and shipping it, and then dealing with possible risks of damage or insurance claims or cheating buyers trying to scam me. Per hour, I can make money here in easier ways.
Sure, the occasional $50 M90 will bring a pretty high profit margin that will more than cover the time spent on that one box by itself, but those kinds of scores are few and far between, and a lot of time is spent on fruitless hunting to get them, and most boxes I find won't bring that kind of worthwhile return.
Average it all out, and it isn't something one does "for the money". If I did it full-time, I don't think I could begin to make a living from selling these. Definitely not a good living. It has to be seen as a hobby that can at least partially pay for itself through some selling. To me, that adds to the appeal of the hobby; I can afford to do it in large part because I can get back the "investment", or at least much of it.
The other motivation for selling is to clear out space taken up by boxes that may not have grown on me or are not my favorites, so that I can get other, new ones. In that way, at least I can continue to "hunt" for new ones and enjoy the hunting process for longer. Without selling some, I'll have to stop VERY soon, as my available storage space is packed! If I had a big warehouse, maybe I'd go ahead and try to get ten, fifteen or twenty M70s (although I think that borders on mental illness!), but I CAN'T get too many, because I don't have room.
IF I am going to sell some anyway, I don't want to LOSE money on them. That doesn't make sense, so money is an issue in that sense when deciding to buy or not to buy. It isn't an issue with the first one I get of a given box I want, because I don't intend to resell them. It is an issue with the duplicates, because I'll probably end up selling them.
If I can make money on M70s, then I don't mind getting more than I want in my collection; selling them will help pay for the ones I keep (because I DO LIKE them and want to have one or two for my "permanent" or personal collection). But because it isn't really the money that motivates me as much as the collecting does, I just don't get the same thrill from finding the fifth or eighth one that I got when I found the first one. That's why the fifth or eighth "find" doesn't have the same thrill.
I hope that makes sense. Money IS a factor, indeed, but NOT the most important one. Just a part of the whole thing that I do not ignore.
The 9994 is kind of a sleeper box, I think it's one of the better boxes in it's size range.
Wow!I was hoping for another of your adventures to be posted in the forum when I got home from work.This was a really nice read!Personally I love drizzly evenings and rainy days.Perhaps you were just tired.It sounds as though you just needed to get back to the comfort of home to realize the thrill of the great boxes you found.It reminds me of the times I used to go hunting for used vinyl some years back.I worked nights and would hunt by day.Only after collapsing exhaused at the end of a very long day did I feel the thrill and actually appreciate my finds.I can totally relate to that and it brings back memories.