Aside from the stuff that I’ve bought over the years, the equipment that I find in the recesses of my gear closet typically falls into two categories. The first is old sample products, many of which were given to me for reviews and where I was not required to send them back to the vendor.

One example of that is the BlueBeam by Audio Authority, a dongle (technical term) that converts IR control impulses to BlueTooth, and was designed to allow AV Pros to integrate Sony Playstation 3s into AV control systems.

Some of you may remember how aggravated AV Pros were when it was discovered the PS3 had no facility for IR or RF itself, with only BlueTooth as its native control for its Blu-ray player. Well, this was Audio Authority’s solution, and it worked, too!

The second category is the equipment that I’ve won as prizes for sales contests. In fact, in my big AV system in the TV room, half the equipment in my setup were prizes in one contest or another, including speakers by Mission and Totem Acoustic, and my Denon DVD player.

The latter category includes a Denon DRA-295 stereo integrated receiver sitting at the bottom of my Gear Closet. It’s both inaccurate and unkind to call it obsolete: a better description would be that it’s currently surplus to my requirements, so off to the gear closet it went.

It’s still a perfectly decent little 50-watt x2 integrated, I just need to find a good home for it. And then there’s things in my Gear Closet that I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t disposed of them yet, including a truly surprising number of RG-6 cable splitters.

That also includes a broken Shaw HD-PVR. The hard-drive is toast, but the HD-tuner still works, which I suppose was my rationale for holding on to it.

Still, it’s probably time to take it to the eco-station.