My parents have finally (some 14 years after I went to college) remodelled my former bedroom into a guest bedroom. Around the time I left, my parents got a shiny new stereo system for the family room and moved their ancient record player/8-track/radio all-in-one system ("solid state!") to my old bedroom, which I now use to hook up my empeg when I'm visiting home.

As part of the remodelling, my father plans to ditch the ancient stereo (which, I believe, dates to when he was in college). Here are the constraints for its replacement. He wants to spend $100, max. CD player and radio are the basic required features. Plus, they have a pair of unspecified but apparently good bookshelf speakers which they got when a relative passed away recently.

He thinks he'll buy a generic boombox and just hook up the good speakers. This seems like a recipe for really crappy sound, but I'm hard pressed to find a better solution at that price point. He's not enough of an MP3 geek that a Rio Receiver would be the right answer, but that's the right sort of box.

My temptation is to encourage him to do a five-channel upgrade to the main stereo system, and move his relatively nice (albeit 16 years old) Nakamichi two-channel receiver to the bedroom. Then, $100 is more than enough to get some random CD player.

Ideas? Thoughts?

Budgets? We don't need no stinkin' budgets. Buy a cheap receiver and find a cheap CD player. Yes, you'll be over budget, but hopefully not by too much. The only real disadvantage for a bedroom system is boom boxes often have alarm and sleep timers, and receivers don't.

Matthew

Used gear does seem like a much better deal than new gear, particularly for an unchallenging application like this one. Somewhere, at some garage sale, I'll bet somebody's ditching an old perfectly-good two-channel receiver for a shiny new 5-channel model. We just have to deploy my sister, the queen of garage sales finds.