Sustainability probably isn’t the first word to come to mind when thinking hi-fi.
After all, good hi-fi tech is often enough to last a lifetime. At least, that used to be the case. Where once stood a broad armada of budget hi-fi separates, built like tanks and endlessly repairable regardless of price point, today stands a crowded field of budget audio equipment that tends more towards ‘disposable’, as new technologies and planned obsolescences doom a crowded field of cheap hi-fi separates to a woefully short life.
The market is full of excellent and high-quality hi-fi equipment, but a lot of this equipment exceeds the meagre budgets of cash-strapped audio lovers. When the expensive stuff is expensive, and the cheap stuff frankly terrible-sounding, what’s left?
Good news: the old guard is still there.
A broad and deep tradition of quality used hi-fi separates remains, into which you can breathe a second, third, or umpteenth life. The trick is finding the puzzle pieces built to stand the test of time, and built to provide you with your ideal hi-fi sound for cheap.
But how do you do that? You read this missive…
Keep an open mind
Buying used is easy, but it can also be monumentally difficult – and it gets exponentially more so, the more exacting you are about what you’re looking for.
Not everyone gets to find a pristine pair of KEF speakers in a thrift store (or charity shop, across the pond) for cents (or pennies). If you go online or head out thrifting with the expectation of doing so yourself, you’ll only end up disappointed (and, crucially, remain speakerless while disappointed).
There are some usual-suspect brands in the ‘vintage gold-dust’ pile just as there are in our roundups of the best stereo speakers and the best turntables that have not already been owned. And those revered heritage brands are there because of their demonstrable quality even against today’s hi-fi fare – which is why those usual-suspect brands are often eye-wateringly pricey.
As such, building a second-hand hi-fi collection that walks the walk should be an iterative process, rather than a singular event. This enables you to benefit from experimentation and risk-taking, often yielding intriguing, impressive and straight-up fun results from underdog and best-kept-secret brands.
Lose your pretentions
More generally, all of us have, to some extent, a pedestaling problem when it comes to ‘stuff’. Brands get elevated for reasons beyond the quality of their product, an effect that can lead you to some false assumptions about what’s worth putting in your living-room hi-fi. Even seasoned deal-sniffers can be guilty of pedestaling certain brands or eras of hi-fi, despite having all the hallmarks of knowing better.
While it’s cool to imagine older vintage equipment as imbued with some ineffable mojo, the reality is a bit more banal: a piece of hi-fi is only as good as it’s built, or as rich and mojo-ey as the ageing parts within have allowed it to be. Lucky for you, this means a quicker and cheaper journey to an excellent-sounding (and sustainably-built) system.
Do your research
So, how do you make the distinction between something worth your while and something barely worth the shipping costs? The golden word: research. Granted, the internet isn’t quite the Information Superhighway™ it used to be, but some vestigial aspects remain – in the form of hobby groups, hyper-specific gear forums and, to some extent, Reddit.
Just adding ‘forum’ or ‘Reddit’ to the terms you Google will filter out a lot of useless bilge, and get you closer to some lived experiences with the hi-fi stuff you’re after. You could also dust off your Facebook account and join a handful of groups that align with your hi-fi interests. You know how Facebook is famously a ‘boomer’ site now? Well, loads of those ‘boomers’ have decades of intimate vocational knowledge built-up, and have all the free time in the world to lecture you on it!
There are two key ways to approach second-hand hi-fi hunting. You can start with the research, then narrow yourself down to some interesting-sounding hi-fi pieces that stick out from the decades-old forum logs you’re picking through. Alternatively, you could start a broad search on online marketplaces, and research the compelling product listings that catch your eye.
If you’re googling broadly about what kinds of receivers to buy, for instance, your research will yield numerous usual-suspect brands well-loved by budget audiophiles – Denon, Pioneer, Onkyo, Technics, Cambridge Audio, Rotel and more besides. If they were making hi-fi separates before the Millennium, and people are still speaking enthusiastically about them by the 2010s, there’ll be plenty of arguments to be made for their reliability. And now you have some direction for your eBay searches!
Personally, I prefer the latter approach to the former. I find reading into peculiar, eye-catching or just straight-up cheap listings much more rewarding to my inquisitive nature – besides which, I feel this route opens us up to potential rewards way beyond usual-suspect brands.
For instance, my daily-driver bookshelf speakers are a pair of Celestion F1s (see above). Celestion is better known to me for its excellent guitar amp speakers, but I’d never considered the company would demonstrate similar excellence in consumer hi-fi, until I saw an eBay listing for the speakers in 2024.
A little googling will show you a not-insignificant amount of love for the F1s, espoused in quite a few forums – and a common thread between them that I translate as “best-kept secret in budget hi-fi”.
They still are today; I bought them for just £30, which may be the most impactful £30 I’ve ever spent on anything audio. Despite being frankly miniscule, the F1s have a surprisingly rotund bass to them. The mid-range is astoundingly rich, and the top-end glassy-clear as opposed to treble-sharp. They’re a joy to listen to, and an order of magnitude cheaper than comparable speakers currently on retail shelves.
Learn some skills!
Your horizons are broader with more knowledge of the categories in which you’re buying, but can be made broader still with a little bit of skill-building. No one’s expecting you to be an electrical engineer, but even a tiny bit of vocational knowledge – coupled with a curious, diagnostic frame of mind – can dramatically improve your chances of winning big on older hi-fi.
Even just brushing up on the basics can help you considerably. Changing fuses, wiring plugs, swapping turntable cartridges – all this is simple knowledge that could help you add years of life to the things you own and the things you buy. Which leads me to my number-one winning strategy for finding good hi-fi cheap…
Look for ‘broken’ things
In brushing up on some basic and handy skills, you’ve given yourself more vocational knowledge than the huge majority of private sellers on eBay or Facebook Marketplace. As such, you’re in a position to figure out whether a product marked as faulty is actually that – or if it’s something you could fix in five minutes with a screwdriver or some ‘percussive maintenance’ (read: banging it a few times).
Turntables are a great example of this in practice. Less knowledgeable sellers might sell a decent record player as faulty because it doesn’t play at the right speed, or because the needle is broken.
Slow, sluggish play in belt-drive turntables tends to be the result of an old, loose belt, which can be replaced for pennies. Swapping cartridges on a turntable is a basic maintenance task, and the primary way to upgrade them too; a broken needle is simply an opportunity to level up an already-great old-school record player.
Many other hi-fi items are re-sold online as ‘spares and repair’ simply because the seller doesn’t have the means to test it properly, and would rather a quick, cheap sale over the hassle of a potential return. This is obviously a bit of gamble, but for me it happens to have paid off more often than not.
My own living-room hi-fi amp is an old Cambridge Audio Azur 540r – an AV receiver with some impressive I/O, from a brand with a great deal of goodwill. This amp is nothing special today, but I know its auditory value far exceeds its second-hand value; it’s broad, deep, and clear as anything – an ideal platform amp for other separates, that also happens to outperform many budget hi-fi separates currently on the market. I found this for ‘spares and repair’ on eBay, and netted it for just shy of £50. The problem? It was missing a plug, and (luckily) worked just fine when supplied with one.
If I’d been less lucky, I’d have sold it on and recouped my just-less-than-£50.
This attitude to buying hi-fi equipment could well lead you to some interesting finds of your own, and at the very least you’ll learn some lessons on diagnosing issues in the gear you collect. Of course, this is something of a trade between money and time – but if you’ve the budget, you can afford yourself the convenience of buying something that Actually Definitely Works.
Search smart
Whether or not you’ve the time and patience to try your luck on ‘faulty’ tech, there are other clever ways to navigate the boundless fields of used hi-fi stuff online.
Often, sellers won’t know exactly what they have, and as a result will misdescribe or even misspell their listings accordingly. Not only could you find prices far below the going rate for certain items, but also much less competition for the same item!
Identify some common misspellings, and type them between quotation marks in eBay’s search bar – “vynyl”, “amplifyer” and so on. This isn’t a foolproof method, and many sites are getting better at including these misspelt listings in with correctly-spelt search terms, but once in a while you’ll find something incredible.
On the music-making side of things, I managed to bag a mid-70s Fender Twin Reverb – my holy grail guitar amplifier – for less than £600 (around $800 orAU$1,250), via a Facebook Marketplace listing for a ‘Tender Twin’. Seriously!
Open yourself to serendipity
Sometimes, the cosmos quite simply throws you a bone – whether its KEFs in a charity shop, or something altogether more bizarre. My favourite personal moment of cosmic hi-fi serendipity came in the summer of 2013. Manchester United supporters were freshly mourning the retirement of Sir Alex Ferguson; the entire Scottish population was freshly celebrating the death of Margaret Thatcher; Foals’ Holy Fire was actively unseating alt-J’s An Awesome Wave for TV-ident stardom; and I was moving into my first ever student house-share.
After a boiling afternoon of shipping boxes across a sweltering Leeds suburb, I stopped for a moment’s rest in my new rear-facing living room – and saw It. It was a Rotel RP-820 record player, balanced atop a Rotel RCX-820L integrated hi-fi system, itself balanced atop a pair of matching Rotel speakers. And all of that was balanced atop next-door’s green bin (trash can).
After some hurried enquiries with our outgoing neighbours (“are you really throwing that away?”), this vintage hunk of consumer hi-fi history swiftly became mine. For free. Of course, it didn’t work right away. But research, a little skill-building and about £50 on some parts turned 2013’s landfill into a piece of equipment that I still use today.
In conclusion…
I wasn’t looking for Rotel equipment piled on bins, or anywhere for that matter – but Rotel equipment I found, and fell in love with. Thrown out with the trash. Likewise, those best-kept-secret Celestion speakers fell into my lap instead of known-quantity KEF options, and blew me away accordingly. My Cambridge Audio amp is nothing super-special, perhaps, but it came to me when I was looking at £400 integrated amps I couldn’t afford, and offered me more practical utilities for almost a tenth of the price. I have countless more examples I could provide, but what I’m essentially reaching at is that great hi-fi isn’t born of expectation, it’s born of discovery.
By looking for bargains, and learning more about different aspects of hi-fi in the process, you enrich yourself. You get to discover what really matters to you when it comes to music-listening paraphernalia, without the creeping spectre of sunk-cost fallacy looming over your experience.
Even if your conclusion is that older tech just isn’t doing it for you, you’ll come away from your used-gear experimentation armed with knowledge that’ll get you to your ideal hi-fi system so much quicker – and with far less tech waste in your wake.
There’s something undeniably magical about chasing great sound in older, second-hand hi-fi bits and bats. That magic comes both from finding secret gems and from bringing new life to old stuff – a magic we could readily describe as ‘mojo’ in its own right.
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