Giveaway of the century

Sometimes you make your own fortune through hard work and careful planning. Other times you just happen to be in the right place at the right time. Yesterday was the latter.

I'd wandered in to the local branch of Sevenoaks Hi-Fi (who I'm on first name terms with). Was chatting to the manager, and was discussing the older Arcam AV receivers (AVR250 and 300), specifically the design fault on the PSU that led to the DSP chips overheating and failing. A PSU mod stopped it happening, but anyway...

The chap mentioned that there was an AVR300 out the back that a customer had traded in, not sure if it was working or not but even if it worked it wasn't worth them selling it, as they don't have any HDMI capability, which was a shame as it was quite a good 2ch amp. He said "so we'll have to send it out for WEEE recycling..." and must have seen the look of horror on my face as his next words were "you can have it if you like?"

Needless to say I snapped his hand off. The thinking was I could use my Black Box 50 as the DAC (as at present) and use the AVR300 as a 2ch amplifier.

Got it home, hooked up the digital out from the PC - it worked perfectly. Someone had fiddled with the menus and re-assigned all the optical inputs to null, but the co-ax worked.

I did a factory reset and have now permanently installed it in my dining room. It's still driving the Mission 760iSEs via Audioquest 14/4 cable, although I've finally got around to heatshrinking the end of the speaker cables and soldering some banana plugs onto them (1 pair at the amp end, 2 pairs at the speaker end for bi-wiring).

I'd forgotten just how good the AVR250 and 300 sounded. I had an AVR250 some years back which was stolen during a break-in. It's just perfect as a PC music system. And all for the grand total cost of zero.

My faith in humanity is restored.