When You Just Miss Out On Buying A Piece Of Audio Equipment You've Always Wanted On An Online Marketplace

[bluesman]

See, if you hadn't had to get an OK from "the boss"' those Maggie's would have been yours.

It all depends on what floats your boat. In response to the OP, I wandered into my dealer's shop one fine day in 1975 or so to find a like-new Crown CX844 sitting on his counter. It belonged to one of his regular customers, who happened to be a senior engineer with the Pennsylvania Railroad (which was part of Conrail by then, as I recall) and was on the go so much that he literally never used the deck. He asked Dan to find it a good home, and I was the intended recipient at a very fair price. Those of you who remember Crown tape decks know that this was a great but very pricey piece, and I only spent a few minutes thinking before deciding that I should pass on it (I was a surgical resident at the time and my wife was teaching).

 

A few weeks later, I happened to tell me wife about it, and she said, "You've wanted one for a long time and it'll last for years. Go back and buy it." But it was already sold, so she had Dan order a new deck for me for the amount I would have spent on the used CX. That bought me a high speed, 1/4 track, 2 channel SX724, which was a bit downscale from the 4 track 4 channel SX - but I certainly wasn't complaining, and I used that deck hard and lovingly until finally moving to computer recording and selling it a few years ago.

 

Marriage isn't for everyone - that's for sure. It's difficult at times and works out badly as often as not, if statistics are to be believed. But if it's right for you and you can truly share all of life with your mate, it's a wonderful thing. I've always told my wife what I wanted before buying it, usually in a phone call from the seller's premises. The very few times she's objected in 4+ decades, she's offered valid reasons beyond a knee-jerk "no". So I have no complaints at all.

 

Of course, I do miss those Infinity Reference Standards (which, in all fairness, I may have failed to describe adequately to her when calling from the dealer's showroom). I got them for a song and absolutely loved them for the year or so I had them before she asked nicely but firmly that I sell them and go back to my LS3/5as. OK - they may well have been a bit large for our 8' by 17' library with an 8' ceiling. And it was nice to be able to sit with other people in that room again.

[bluesman]

I applaud your purchase of the Infinity's and it's too bad your time with them only lasted a year. The way I look at it, people can sit anywhere! How many individuals got to own the Reference Standard's back then!

 

JC

And the reason I got them for so incredibly cheap a price was that they'd been kicked to the curb by multiple wives from the original owner's to the one who brought them back & bought Heresy instead. I think the dealer had exhausted every customer he knew who would try to adopt them, as they'd been sitting in the same corner of his showroom for months when he offered them to me.

 

BTW, this was not my regular, long term dealer (who wasn't an Infinity fan). It was a local shop (also now long gone) on the Philly main line that catered mostly to the moneyed crowd who saw "Hifi" and musical instruments as furniture. They carried excellent stuff, but it had to impress the guests to pass the test. The Refs were in and out of some major mansions before their brief stop in our humble abode. And, truth be told, we didn't have the space they needed to sound their best.

 

But they were great fun to have & play with for a while!

[bluesman]

A common ploy by the female of the species in order to justify her expenditures on her hobby (the house) is that while hubby's expenditures are for him, and therefore selfish, her spending is for "us". Of course, that's poppycock. she gets the same pleasure from new drapes as he gets from a new DAC or new speakers.

George, my friend, you're living in the 1960s. Most women today and for the last 2+ decades are barely recognizable as descendants of Donna Reed and June Cleaver. Women are now real people with jobs, interests, personal preferences, and valid opinions of their own. Wake up, man!

 

David

[bluesman]

Not the one's I know! I know many married couples ranging in age from their late twenties all the way into their sixties. All the women are as I described. Nest building is hard-wired into the female psyche, they can't not do it. Every wife I have ever encountered wants to spend the lion's share of the couple's income on the house or apartment, and think that their hubby's/boyfriend's interests are stupid (no matter what they might be) and a waste of money that could (and should) go toward a new kitchen, new carpets, drapes, etc.

Wow - that's a truly depressing portrait if ever I've seen one! We have friends ranging from their 30s to their 90s (I'm about to turn 70 and my wife's a few years behind me), and most of them live far different lives than you describe. The 20 or so couples with whom we're closest include professional women (docs, lawyers, teachers, accountants, architects, musicians, designers etc) or craftswomen married to everything from health and law professionals to builders, custom furniture makers, musicians, photographers, chefs, journalists etc. We have married female friends who are farmers, TV news anchors, weavers, financial consultants, car salespeople, shopkeepers, etc - and none of them behaves as you describe. Neither do the more traditionally occupied wives we know.

 

Most of the couples we know share both their resources and decisions about how to allocate them. Interestingly, a surprising number are childless by choice across the age spectrum. We chose to have kids together and (like most of the parents we know) have shared the blame since doing so (just kidding......most of the time!) So I have to tell you again that Mary Tyler Moore and Donna Reed are barely able to cling to their curtains in the headwinds of change.

 

I must admit that I'd probably feel the same way you do about marriage if the only women I knew were sitcom clones.