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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

128x128lou_setriodes
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.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
14,147 posts
 
The Koss Model 1A are big full range electrostatics that can be tri-amped if that is your wont. I had the Fulton Nuance three-way speakers which are not chopped liver. I also had two, count em, Ultra Tweeters, another very interesting speaker in it's own right, in the room when I had the Fultons.

roxy54's avatar
roxy54
2,651 posts
 
i owned a pair of the large Nestorovic 5as speakers which you could consider rare. They weren't perfect but they were great in some ways and I really enjoyed my time with them.
I still own a pair of Celestion Kingstons which are also sort of rare and also very good.

I agree that it is a little more added fun to own an unusual component.
I forgot...I also own an Audio Note Kit One integrated 300B amp which is by no means rare, but mine is the 10th Anniversary edition with the dual c-core transformers, which not too many people order. 
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