You'd be amazed at how much an enterprising person can collect for nothing but some blood, sweat and ingenuity. I ended up with a room looking somewhat like tha

You'd be amazed at how much an enterprising person can collect for nothing but some blood, sweat and ingenuity. I ended up with a room looking somewhat like that by finding and repairing stuff here and there, often dumped at the street for the garbage truck to collect. Amplifiers with blown channels? dump ' m. Television with a fried tripler (HT ladder) or HT diode? On the street! Speaker boxes with one blown driver? Get rid of it. Reel to reel deck with some bad rubber here and there? Tube radio which just sits and hums? Begone, who wants a boat anchor like that? Well, I did. It launched me on a career of 'rescuing' left-over hardware which still keeps me from buying new stuff unless absolutely necessary. While I might not be a good consumer (my father's oft-heard reaction when I spoke of my latest conquest: 'if everyone were like you the economy would crumble, just toss the rubbish and buy something new') but I don't feel this to be a prime responsibility: we're not here to support the economy, the economy exists by virtue of all our interactions. If the economy can only survive by virtue of people being wasteful the solution is not to produce more waste but to fix the economy. This will lead to some articles becoming more expensive - like they used to be - but it will also lead to less waste being produced, fixing another problem. The rapid pace of technical developments between the 50's - the era from which some of the stuff our teenage bedrooms were filled with - and now has been part of the reason for the development of modern throw-away equipment. Now that this pace has slowed down and in some cases halted or reversed (want a good compact cassette player? Buy a second-hand older model and restore it) there is often no direct incitement for replacement of 'obsolete' hardware: an amplifier from the 90's sounds just as good as one from two decades later. It would make sense to repair that older model instead of buying something new, were it not for the fact that somewhere along the line manufacturers 'forgot' to think about repairability when designing hardware, 'forgot' about providing schematic diagrams or only provided them to 'authorised' repair centres, started using hard to source components, etc. Fortunately those latter 'omissions' have been reversed for a good deal by the existence of active repair communities on the 'net ([1], [2], etc) so the curious and enterprising can still continue on their mission of learning and discovery. [1] https://www.eserviceinfo.com/ https://www.eserviceinfo.com/ [2] https://elektrotanya.com https://elektrotanya.com