As an audiophile (and an audiophile in recovery, as it were) I’ve always been in the camp that subscribes to Value: that getting the Best Bang For Your Buck is a more important consideration than just throwing money around.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it?

Spend enough money on your audio system and of course it will sound great. Frankly, it had better.

For people like me, bliss comes from finding a bargain, a hidden gem, a contender that fights above its weight:  a piece of gear whose wow factor when listening to it is magnifying by the low price tag.

I don’t go so far as to deride high priced gear, or as one friend likes to call them, “brushed aluminum high-current space heaters that cost five figures.” But most, if not all of my all-time favorite pieces of audio gear have all been relatively inexpensive, yet delivered crystal-clear, heartbreaking acuity to the music that played through them.

Even better, is when a value-oriented piece of gear is even lower priced still, for whatever reason. Some of my favorite pieces have come my way dirt-cheap, sometimes with a story to tell.

Doing inventory years ago, I found a “lost” pair of speakers, the PSB 500 (pictured above). They had been in a dark corner of the back room, buried under spools of speaker wire.

They weren’t the best-looking speakers: the black cabinets were scratched to hell from having wire spools resting on and against them, and the grilles were missing. But the drivers themselves were fine, and testing them, they still sounded 100%.

I admit to a little bit of begging and wheedling my manager, but since they were unsellable in their condition, he got the approval of our District Manager, he vended them to me for a hundred bucks.

I eventually traded them to a friend years later, but I loved those speakers.

Another favorite pair of speakers came my way in a similar manner. I was promoted to store manager at a location that had been the district’s dumping ground for clearance stock for a decade, a situation that I’ve blogged about before.

While there was a lot of trash in the back room, there were also a few treasures.

One of those treasures was a pair of PSB Alpha bookshelf speakers. In fact, one of the best –reviewed bookshelf speakers of all time.

What had kept these poor little fellows unsold was their color: white with white grilles. At the time white speakers were hideously unfashionable, and years later while covering CEDIA Expo (2010 if I recall correctly) I had a good laugh with Vince Bruzzese and Lucy Lentini from Totem Acoustic, who were promoting white speakers as the “latest trend” in speakers as room décor.

Long story short, I took them home for thirty dollars for the pair, plus tax.

I’m still using them today in my office. They play iTunes from my laptop and the various terrabytes of external hard drives that house my music collection, powered by a Speakercraft Big Bang 2125 stereo amplifier.

Speakercraft, despite their turbulent corporate history has always made high-grade, often regrettably underestimated and unappreciated products. The Big Bang series of amplifiers in particular were always horribly neglected by audio snobs, due perhaps in part to their elemental, industrial looking appearance. The BB2125 is not a sexy amp, it’s just a big black box, but it sounds amazing.

Best of all, it was FREE: a gift from Speakercraft in appreciation for all of my support over the years.

If you have a beloved piece of gear, and a story behind it, share it with us in the comments.