Cheapest system you could ever stand to listen to

... or, where have you encountered an amazingly cheap system that really surprised you?

My son is a college student and he and his house mates have put together a system for $67 that sounds ridiculously good. Here is the system along with where each piece came from:

-2007 Toshiba DVD player, $35, Discount box store
-late eighties Onkyo TX-26 Stereo Receiver, $25, pond shop
-unknown vintage Bose 401 floor standing speakers in excellent condition, FREE off the parking strip (the neighboring college kids couldn't "figure out how to hook them up to their TV" and abandoned them on moving out)
-18 gauge speaker wire, FREE from pond shop owner
-ICs came in box with DVD
-Powerstrip $7, Fred Meyers

When I first saw this system, the speakers were jammed against the wall in opposite corners of the room and the DVD player was hooked up to the receiver's phono section. The boys thought the amp must be really crappy or broken since the sound was thin, etched and flat. I told them that an Onkyo should sound pretty good and hooked the source up to the proper inputs. I also suggested moving the speakers along the same wall on either side of their TV, about a foot or more out in the room and about 7 ft. apart.

The first thing we listened to was the soundtrack for the DVD "House of Flying Daggers". Listening to the drum scene was more like listening to the "House of Flying Sound". We all had to laugh at how good the $67 system sounded. Later listening to red book recordings of Yo Yo Ma, Patricia Barber, The Blue Scholars, some well recorded instrumental jazz and some other stuff reinforced my thoughts that this system sounds pretty darn good, perhaps about 85% as good as a $25,000 system I had just listened to at a hi fi shop the same day. The bass from the Onkyo/Bose combo is full and fast but not up to true hi fi standards for tightness or depth (the receiver only pumps 38 watts), and the highs don't sparkle or shimmer with the same airiness associated with multi-thousand dollar systems. But the funky little Bose towers have decent midrange and throw sound around the room with uncanny realism.

In the final analysis, this cheap little system sounds good enough to listen to all day and not get fatigued or annoyed. It also works quite well when driven by a PC or Mac laptop computer. This experience makes me reevaluate what its possible to build on a tight budget with some persistence and a little (OK, maybe a lot) of luck.