I bought a nice oscilloscope last year from the pawn shop for $40. I don't think most of their clientele (or the staff) even knew what it was.

>I don't think most of their clientele (or the staff) even knew what it was.

I bought a pair of nice Roland studio-level reference monitor speakers from a pawn shop like that once. They cost me 90 dollars, they retailed for something like 1750.

When I paid the person behind the counter told me that many people had tried to get these to work and brought them back because they couldn't figure out the cable to use -- and due to that difficulty they had marked them down from 200 to 90.

It was an XLR plug. They worked beautifully.

Pawn shops are filled with audio gear from desperate, broke artists. XLR is a pretty standard in the audio community. I even have a 2.5mm-to-XLR adapter on my desk. This pawn shop must be really far from any place with performance venues.

Now on the other hand I had some old Bang and Olufsen speakers that used proprietary everything. Even the audio input was some kind of balanced 24V signaling 5-pin DIN connectors. Basically you could not plug into anything except another B&O.

P.S.: I did tell the staff what it was, but they just shrugged their shoulders. So I paid $40.