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The Best & Rarest of all Stereo Gear

When it comes to stereo gear, to me, besides sound and build quality/reliability, the next thing I look for is how rare it is. There is just something about very rare, one-off, stereo gear that makes it very enticing to find and acquire. Over the years, I've been lucky enough to have found some rare gear and there's still others items that I'd like to find.

Recently, in my local CL, there was a very rare pair of Symdex speakers available for $50 that retailed at over $2200. When I inquired about them, they were gone. There is very little on the net about these speakers and later was lucky enough to have found a pair of Paisley Research AE-500 speakers. The Paisleys are amazing & are really giving my Omega Grande 8's a run for their money.

How about the Wingate 2000a amp? In 30 years, I've never seen one of these beauties for sale. Does anyone remember the EJ Jordan shoe box sized amp and preamp?

Please share if you are fortunate enough to have owned any ultra rare gear or if you are looking to acquire something unusual. (I'll share my own list of rare acquisitions and wants in a follow up post. I didn't want to make this initial post too lengthy).

Look forward to hearing your responses, thanks for reading,
Lou

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don_c55
823 posts
 
I have a Spread Spectrum Technologies Son of Ampzilla 2000 power amp.

Designed by James Bongiorno from GAS (Great Sound Company) and Sumo fame.

Very few were made and sold. Few dealers, due to the fact that James had an abrasive personality.

A SOTA sounding 100 w/pc amp, with a 2400 V/A transformer, and unique circuit design.

Very rare.

Also an original Koetsu Black MC cartridge  designed by the founder of Koetsu in the early 80's.
ivanj
640 posts
 
The first strain gauge cartridge was from Panasonic or some other Japanese manufacturer. Win, Rowland and so on just modified or had special interface electronics built for them. You could actually change the stylus, I recall. I tried to get MLAS to build a special board/interface box for the JC-2 but Mark was into the Goldmund and the nude EMTs...before they hit the conventional consciousness and importation under their own name.
Then there was Ikeda-San, the FR1s, and finally his own company. Mark, Jeff and others went with Ikeda-san's MC Decca and private labeled it, we shan't hear its like again!
ivanj
640 posts
 
How about the Fulton J's?

larryi
1,972 posts
 
Sao Win made a few unusual cartridges, such as, a field effect transistor cartridge.  The signal generating element of the cartridge was a transistor: the gate element being a permanently charged electret attached to the cantilever which controlled the electron flow through the rest of the transistor.  I heard this cartridge once, and the system it was in sounded very good.  I bet this is extremely rare.
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
4,908 posts
 
The Fulton J’s! I bought a pair from John Garland in ’74, which replaced Tympani I’s in my system. Another rare and excellent speaker is the ESS Super Quad. It consisted of the original Quad ESL for midrange, a transmission line-loaded KEF B139 woofer for bass, and RTR ESL tweeters. Similar in concept to the Levinson HDQ (another rare one), which had two Quads per speaker, a Hartley 24" woofer, and Decca ribbon tweeter. I think the Super Quad was priced around $2,000, same as it’s main competition, the Infinity Servo-Static IA. The Super Quad evolved from ESS’ Transtatic I (of which I have a pair), which had the same TL KEF woofer and RTR tweeters, but with a KEF 5" Bextrene midrange driver. That speaker was priced at $1200.
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