The sweet spot for home turntable enthusiasts on a budget seems to be the $200 mark. This might be the best of the bunch.
One can only imagine the sake-fueled club hopping that led to the development of the Seiko Frequency drum machine watch.
Amplifier Bargains and $150 Speaker Kits
By James Grahame
I read a piece about an amazing $30 digital amplifier (the Sonic Impact T-Amp) on ohGizmo this morning. Apparently, this little box sounds as good as amps costing 100X as much. I'm a tad skeptical: top-notch audio components are very expensive to produce. Extremely low cost hi-fi usually requires a radically new design (which might be the case with the T-Amp), or a do-it-yourself approach.
Since radical design breakthroughs are few and far between, I prefer to focus on DIY projects. Parts Express stocks hundreds of kits and components for rolling your own audio systems. Some are quite affordable, too -- the $150 Dayton Audio BR1-S shielded monitor speakers definitely caught my eye as a possible multimedia system upgrade. Oh, they sell the Sonic Impact T-Amp, too.
Speaker Kits (Parts Express)
The $30 "Sounds like it cost 100X as much" Sonic Impact T-Amp (Amazon product page)
