Well, is there? Let me identify myself. I grew up in the 80's, well - I was born in 1981, but I was very concious then, and loved the decade. I read Sears, Service Merchandise, Montgomery Wards and Radio Shack catalogues as a kid, dreaming of owning the beautiful stereo systems on those pages. I was a poor kid, but a bit of a techie. My dad was into electronics in the 60's and had an impressive stereo system he had built (literally) with two Heathkit hi-fi power amps, two Heathkit hi-fi preamps, a Heathkit stereo tuner and phonograph, and two massive hutch-sized 15" woofer equipped enclosures complimented with two 2x3' 3 - way satellite speakers, the cabinets custom-built by my master carpenter grandfather in his basement woodshop. All I had ever seen of this monster system was in old photos, since he'd sold all of it to some lady for 100 bucks right before he met my mom. But, at least he still had all his books and manuals, and his electrical toolbox with all those tools he built them with. When I was maybe 4 or 5, I exibited the behavior of a "radiohead" when I found a screwdriver in our junk drawer, and dissasembled my pocket transistor radio to see what was inside, and how it worked. I went on to hunt people's trash on my paper routes, and scored a fortune of discarded electronics; beautiful, sometimes fully-functional pieces of vintage audio electronic artwork, left for the landfill. I'd deliver my route, emptying my front and back bag, and then retrace and sneakingly pick those people's trash and fill that bag with a shoulder-busting load of loot. I'd then drag it home, stash it, and bring it to my dad, one at a time, and get him to help me fix it. If he didn't know what the problem was, I'd ride my BMX down the road to the local TV repair guy's house. He'd be in his garage-turned-home workshop, with stacks of illusive and unique 70's and 80's era home audio and stereo equiptment surrounding his big workbench, where he hung out every night when he got home. One time, someone was throwing away a very nice looking 19" TV set, and I had to have it. I fount a piece of rope and tied our red "radio flyer" wagon to my bike, (I am not making this up) and towed it home. Plugged it in. and nothing but a line across the screen. I was not about to rig this thing up and drag it anywhere else, so I rode down to the repair guy's house, and asked him what could cause this. he then taught me about "vertical drive transistors" and "cold solder joints". I went home, tore it apart, and re-melted every solder joint on it's circuit board, and miraculously fixed it. I even sold it a few months later for 25 bucks, which was a fortune for an 11-year old poor kid. Anyway, getting back to the point, when I was about 9, or rather in the summer of 1990, my best friend's dad gave him an old stereo. It sat on a bookshelf in his room, and it was beautiful-silver in color, expensive looking, heavy, lots of buttons and switches, an amazing tape deck, and LED VU meters-lights that moved with the music. A radiohead kid's dream! This unit had detachable speakers, which unfortunately had been detached into the unknown oblivion-they were long gone. So was the headphone jack, because the only way to listen to this stereo was to hook up an old beat-up 6x9 car speaker to a pair of speaker wires hanging out of the hole that the headphone jack once resided. We would hide in his basement bedroom, and blair our late 80's-early 90's favorite music on that old stereo any time we could. As we traded baseball cards, pocket knives, and everything else back and forth, I made it my goal to come up with a trade that would make that stereo mine. After weeks (or months) of dickering, he settled on the fact that it would take $50 to get that stereo from him. Alot of money for a 9 year old kid to come up with, but having two paper routes and a father that was a savings nazi, I had the cash to make it happen. I now had to convince my dad to let me make this "major purchase", in his words. This also took weeks (or months, hard to tell the difference when you're 9). Finally, I convinced him to let me but it, with one condition; he had to inspect it and make sure it met his criteria of such a large amount of money being spent. There was a phone call, and a special visit for this event (my dad never took a shit out of schedule, we only visited their house officially on friday nights for cards. For my dad to even start the car, and drive over there with just me and for me was revolutionary). Whe he looked it over, and by that I mean that he fully tested the unit on their living room table, and expressed utter dismay at the lack of a functional headphone jack, let alone the speaker wire dangling out of it's orfice. He then pulled me aside and taught me the art of making an offer, or "jewing down" as he called it. After some light snickering from the dads, he got my buddy to let me buy it for $10, which amazed me-because now I own my dream, for 10 bucks! When we got home, I was carrying that stereo off to my room when my dad stopped me. "Bring that out here, put it on the kitchen table", he said. That night was history, in many ways. He got his electrical box out, and in defiance of everything he had tried to teach me about taking all my things apart, TOOK IT APART WITH ME. My dad explained that we were going to fix that stereo-put in a new jack, and re-wire the speaker jacks in the back so it worked the way it was supposed to. We took it apart and found all the cut wires, and by trial and error figured out what each one was. In the next few days, we made another special trip to Radio Shack, where I got to decide if the speakers would shut off or stay on when I plugged in my headphones, depending on which jack I bought. On a saturday, he got that electrical box back out, and taught me how to solder, and install the jack, and ultimately REPAIR that stereo and restore it back to new. He must have been feeling good about it, because he made me throw that old car speaker in the trash, and climbed up into our storage loft in the garage (equivalent of an attic) and brought down something I had never seen before-a pair of sparkomatic car speakers in wooden cabinets he had built years ago. He gave them to me! We set this newly reborn stereo system on top of my dresser, and, now repaired, sounded amazing. I was dumbfounded that this actually belonged to me, and I was in love. A couple things that made it not only special, but also amazingly hi-tech to me, was the feather-touch controls on the tape deck. All cassette decks I'd seen had the standard piano key operation, as you pushed it, you pushed the heads up into the tape and engaged the mechanisim. On ths one, you push a button, and a motor did all that. They weren't keys, they were BUTTONS! It did it electronically! And on top of that, with a lack of a user manual, I figured out what the "MLS" system was; while playing a tape, you hit the "FF/CUE" or "REV" button, and used the "MLS" button to program it to listen for the spaces of quiet between songs, and it would skip up to three songs automatically, and resume playing the tape. AMAZING!!! Also, the "stereo accent" button made anything you were playing sound much wider, maybe a precursor to modern surround sound? As simple as it must've been, it seemed to make the sound wrap around you, something I had also not seen (or rather, "heard" yet) Later, when I had figured out that there was a BIGGER pair of speakers hidden up there, in that loft, he suprised me by going back up there and pulling down two large home-built wooden cabinets, about 2' by 3', and a foot and a half deep, with a nice subtle-styled cloth framed by an equally subtle frame around the perimiter of the front. These weren't wooden boxes, I soon discovered-they were speakers. I had seen them up there in the garage for years, and only seeing the side of one, had never knew what the were. He then explained, as he unscrewed the back off of them to expose the treasure inside, that he had hand- built these in my grandfather's woodshop especially for playing music at his high school graduation party. Inside of these wooden boxes was a lining of owens-corning fiberglass insulation (you have to have this, he explained) and in the middle, mounted to the front of each cabinet, was a 12-inch Lafayette full-range speaker. When you're 9 or 10 years old, and you get blessed with a pair of full-sized house speakers custom built by your father intended to be paired with your own (very grown-up) stereo system, I was lost. This will be one of the most memorable father-son memories I'll ever have. we crammed this rig into a corner of my childhood bedroom, rigged some boards balanced across the speakers to make a sort of "stereo-shelf", and I then had my own entertainment center. That little GE stereo poured beautiful power into those speakers, and they responded with brilliant sound. It sounded so good, and would play so loud, that my dad and I would have "stereo wars", where we'd find the same radio station, and try to drown each other out. He had his "replacement system" for his old Heathkit, which I grew up with; a Gerrard turntable, a 3M-Wollensac tape deck, and a higher-end Sherwood reciever with a real wood cabinet, feeding two Empire hexagon-shaped speakers with heavy circular marble tops. I've never seen anything like them since, these speakers are odd. Looking from the top, they have a round, 6-sided cabinet, and stand about 3 foot tall. They have separate midrange and conical tweeter drivers mounted in the front, which are obscured by a double square metal grille with cloth backing. The real trip? The 12 inch woofer is mounted inside the cabinet, invisible, and utilizing the cabinet's unusual shape, is mounted facing the floor, firing downward and to the open by a slightly smaller hexagon base, which is ported. Imagine a very large bass tube, turned on end, in a nice walnut cabinet, with a white marble top, and a midrange/tweeter in the side. I only gush about these, because like I said, I have never before, or since, seen anything like them. Getting back to the story, I would prop my bedroom door open, find whatever station he was plaing on his stereo, and start the competition. I would turn my volume knob up past the third notch which was where I played my music safely, and venture into the unknown... Forth, fifth-fifth? By the time I hit the sixth notch, I had to start tuning the bass and treble controls to combat the distortion. Seventh notch, almost to the eighth... that was the limit of what it could do... with an analog source. Finally, I got my hands on my first CD player. In the form of a boombox, a hand-me-down, I got an older boombox with a CD player. Remember, I was poor. Also, if you were around then, you'd remember back then, CD players weren't cheap, neither were they built cheap. Remember them being built with "beat cancel" and "compression" controls? And advertized having a "1-bit D/A converter"? This boombox had a 3-level beat cancel switch, and a direct line-level RCA output from the D/A converter. For the rest of you, that meant pure, pure, purest of the pure, clean, distortion-free music. My dad and I found that we could tie this thing into either of our stereos, and not without alot of fear could ease our volume knobs ALL THE WAY TO FULL, and the stereo didn't burn up, the speakers didn't blow, instead, the "Dances With Wolves" soundtrack CD I borrowed from our local library turned his living room, and my bedroom, into a live symphony orchestra. At full volume. We were blown away. Anyway, as time went on, I had adopted his system of cataloguing and building a cassette library and built my own collection of my favorite music, mostly recorded off of FM, and sometimes ripped from CD's borrowed from the library, or other friends rich enough to pay $13 for a CD. I only had my own tapes, cheap discount store blanks, never any actual albums bought from the store. I learned the phrase "prerecorded tape" from my dad, meaning "storebought albums, which are expensive, and we will never own". In comparison, our VHS movie collection was made up of Scotch and Maxwell blanks, carefully ripped from TV broadcasts of our favorite movies we were lucky enough for the local stations to put on the air. We even scoured the sunday newspaper for the week's TV schedule, and sat through the recording process intently waiting, with a trigger-finger on the "pause" button of the VCR, to eliminate those pesky commercial breaks which would be annoying AND embarassing if a visitor were to view one of our movies. Anyway, getting back... I spent hundreds of hours spinning the tuning dial of that stereo, channel surfing or searching for that song I didn't have in my collection, with the tape deck on record AND pause, ready to catch it like an endangered species. I'd spend days just tuning the outside world out and sit in front of it, playing my favorite recordings of my music, my buddies and I dicking around and making skit recordings of ourselves, the occasional sneak tape from my dad's cassette collection so I could listen to what he liked years ago, on and on. That stereo was my best friend. It didnt matter what else was going on in my life at the time, (and sadly, there was alot) but that stereo was always there to help me feel better, and to sit there and look amazing in it's cabinet (yes, my dad eventually bought me an entertainment center-cabinet so I could house my stereo properly) It was my pride and joy, and my best buddy. Untill, one night in late 1993, I was in our living room watching TV when my younger sister and brother came running down the hallway, yelling for me-saying my stereo was making funny noises. I ran to my room, where my stereo was going crazy. the backlights were flickering, the LEDs were blinking yellows, oranges and even purples erratically- not their usual red. And, there was popping and smoke coming out of the back and top. I dove behind it, and jerked all the cords out of it, but it was too late. That night, I sat at the kitchen table in tears as my dad pulled the back off and assesed the damage. On the main circuit board, there were resistors and diodes literally blown in half, with chalky black entrails etched in the silicon from them burning and blowing apart. Capacitors had their tops blown off, their plastic jackets melted, a couple larger ones had their guts still hanging out, one even had a spool of wound paper blown out and across the board if I remember right. I knew that Radio Shack sold all these parts, but many of them had burned or had blown apart beyond recognition-there was no way of knowing what to replace them with. We looked at it for hours, trying to figure out what happened. I knew I had left it on, and it was idle, turned on in my bedroom at the time of death. The best explination we ever came to, and to this day is all I can figure is either 1) the power supply, or something on the mainboard shorted out and sent a shock of high voltage where it didn't belong, hence the popped resistors, capacitors, and half-melted LEDs which I can still remember flashing bright colors that weren't their normal dim red light. Or, 2) At that time, the breaker box in our house was malfunctioning, the main breaker contacts had been burning for awhile, and we had been noticing all the lights in the house flickering for no reason at all. This main breaker was arcing and surging the house's power for months before my dad finally caught it and had it replaced. It was during this time that my stereo had it's stroke and died. Either way, at first, I got by with whatever pitiful stereo equiptment I had salvaged from the trash and repaired, untill I was 12. At a garage sale, I found and bought a nice Kenwood reciever and turntable paired with a rare pair of Norman Labratories speakers, and after a couple years into my teens, purchased what is now a very desirable JVC integrated amplifier that drives those speakers much more beautifully. I was 14 when I got my new-to-me, big, powerful system complete, and I still have and use that system now, when i'm at the latter end of 30. But I kept that burned-up GE stereo untill my early twenties, when I was married and had kids. I was helping clean out my mom's house when I pulled it out of the closet, and finally brushed off any hope of reviving my old friend. I decided to use the bonfire we had lit to give it a "funeral pyre" privately. I dont think I actually said much, but I did burn my arm laying it in the raging flames, said my goodbye, and sent it away. Stupidly, I may say, because at the time, Ebay was new to me, and it had never crossed my mind to use this new resource to find one like it, and frankenstein the two! Since 2002, I have been searching "GE boomboxes" on the internet to find one like it, to no avail. Only recently, I found a couple pictures and one YouTube video of a functional one, and that's it! So, after reading through this site, I decided to post this, in the hopes that maybe somebody out there has this particular stereo, and would like to sell it to me. I'm a busy guy, with 4-going-on-5 kids, a hectic career, and a crazy life that over time, has taken everything I ever owned and recycled it with whatever I have now. I only have a handfull of my stuff from when I was a kid, because through my parents divorce, we left my childhood home and I packed everything I had into a storage unit, which was later destroyed. I only salvaged a few things, a couple worth any memory. I'd really love to find this stereo somewhere, and even though it wont be the one I had, It would mean alot to have one like it.  

If you are still reading, thanks! And please keep your eyes peeled for me!