Surround sound is brilliant and you can get it super cheap if you know how to raccoon it. It's much more useful these days now that tellies have gone flat panel, 'cause trying to squeeze speakers into those skinny things results in sound so shit that a lot of folk have to turn on subtitles even if their hearing's fine, just to make out what people are saying.

So you might start looking at soundbars (which are SUPER expensive for what you get and I don't particularly recommend them) or surround sound systems and go, like, fucking hell these are rich bloke's toys, these are SO expensive. Well, here's what folk generally don't know about these systems:

• You don't have to buy every part all at once, and in fact it's better if you don't. A thrift-shop amp and a pair of 70's dumpster speakers will already piss all over any TV and most soundbars, and you can sort that out for super cheap or even sometimes free and then expand on it later.
• People who are Into This will upgrade individual parts of their systems over time, and sell their old speakers and amps super cheap.
• Speakers haven't changed much since you or I have been alive, so secondhand speakers are definitely the way to go.
• Amps also haven't changed much in the last couple decades, so a secondhand amp from ten years ago is gonna be easily 90% as good as a new amp.

The minimum starting point is an amp and two speakers, but the gold standard of knocking your socks off is set up around an amp and six speakers - one in the middle underneath the telly, one front left, one front right, two in the back left and right, and one big subwoofer, that's your basic Good Surround System, that's called 5.1 (the .1 is the sub). You can get sillier than that, you can go 7.1 or 9.2 if you want, but 5.1 will get the job done real nice.

You can start with two speakers, you can stop with two speakers. Two will already sound a million times better than your telly and it might well be enough for you to be perfectly satisfied with forever, so this guide is written on the assumption that you're gonna start with a cheap amp and two speakers and then see how you feel.

So let's chat about the amp, and then we'll chat about the speakers, but first let's talk about a couple things to avoid.

Like one of those Logitech boxes where the guts are inside the subwoofer and there's little satellite speakers on permanent soldered-in wires. The problem with these is that you get what you get and you can't change it - you can't alter the length of the wires, you can't upgrade the speakers, they're a dead end. What we want is a system made out of parts that we can upgrade here and there when the opportunity arises, both because the results will be better but also because the treasure-hunt is a major component of the fun.

I mean I guess? Like, they're gonna sound better than your telly's speakers, but that's a really low bar, it doesn't take much to sound better than speakers that have to squeeze into like a centimetre of depth. There's nothing really wrong with sound bars, they'll get the job done, it's just we can do way better for way less money.

Fucking Reddit. I saw a guy come to Reddit with a picture of an old 80's amp with just RCA inputs asking how to hook it up, and the people there shat all over it because it's old. Old amps are fine, especially if you're comparing to built-in TV sound, but the people in spaces like this aren't comparing against TV sound, they're comparing against look-how-expensive-my-setup-is posts. If you must get advice online then go for actual home theatre forums rather than Reddit - home theatre forums have their own problems and you'll also have people telling you to throw away your perfectly functional 80's amp and buy something brand new, but there'll be less of the buy-new mentality because Reddit is a photos/memes platform first and foremost, text posts are discouraged by the interface, and the most popular posts will always be pictures of shiny new Klipsch speakers that exist only to say “Look how much money I just spent.” We're not in this to spend a bunch of money, we're in this to get good sound cheap.

Alright let's have a chat about amps. We'll do amps first 'cause they're the complicated bit, the speakers are really easy.

Let's do amps in general first and then we'll get a bit more specific.

Amps, which are more properly called Home Theatre Receivers but which I call amps because that's a mouthful and come on its job is to amplify things, are the bit of the system that makes the sound go to the speakers, and they're all gonna be more or less the same size, a couple shoebox's worth.

Amps go begging all the time. Rich buggers buy them, and then years later they get a better one that can do 4k or Dolby Atmos or some shit, and they sell the old one off cheap or even give it away. You absolutely do not need to buy a new amp from a retail shop like best buy or curry's or amazon or whatever, that is not the way of the raccoon. The way of the raccoon is thrift shops and yard sales and craigslist.

How to evaluate an amp. This is gonna get real general, but if you're reading this then you're new to the game so general is good. If you come across an amp going begging, pick it up. Is it heavy? It's probably half decent. Is the volume knob still there? Is it cracked? You might get a bargain. Does it come with the remote? If it doesn't, then find the model number and look on eBay and see how much a replacement remote is gonna cost you. Look on the back. Is there a lot of Stuff there? Cool, the more Stuff the more gooder. The bits where you plug in the speakers are gonna be either flat square plastic lads with a tiny hole and a spring-mounted clip, or they're gonna be a round finger-sized jack a bit bigger than an RCA plug with a twisty plastic doofer, the latter are called banana plugs or binding post terminals and amps with banana plugs are generally moar gooder than amps with those shitty little spring lads. HDMI holes will make EVERYTHING easier and if you're choosing between a good amp with no HDMI holes and a kinda shitty amp with HDMI holes then get the shitty one, it's still gonna sound better than what you've got now and it'll be orders of magnitude easier to hook up.

If it has five pairs of speaker outputs and a subwoofer output, you're covered for the basics of modern surround sound. If it has MORE than five pairs, then buddy you're gonna have a good time. If the subwoofer output is one RCA plug then you're golden. If it's got TWO subwoofer outputs, and I mean round RCA plugs not those shitty square spring-loaded plastic lads we talked about before, then you're gonna be smiling big.

Good brand names include Yamaha, Denon, Sony, Mitsubishi, Onkyo can be good or can be cheap but is generally decent, don't worry so much about the brand, look more at the capabilities.

Slim pickings in your area? Get whatever's handy, and upgrade later. The amp is not the speakers is not the wire, any amp works with any speakers, it's one part of a system that we're going to gradually evolve over years and there's gonna be a lot of changing and upgrading as we continue the treasure hunt. You can get a better amp later, and sell or give your old amp on to the next guy and the cycle continues.

That's the general, now let's get a bit more specific. But not too much more specific. For simplicity, let's generalize every amp ever made into one of three categories; new, old or really old, which you can also take to mean expensive, cheap or free.

This is gonna end with anything you'll buy new in a shop today, and we'll streeeeetch the beginning of this era all the way back to, ooh, I'm gonna say like 2010ish. If it's got HDMI holes, I'm gonna call it a new amp, and you're unlikely to get one for less than fifty bucks. If you see one going for less than that, lucky day!

HDMI is cool because you have one wire to carry video and audio, and it does it all digitally with a minimum of bollocking around. A good amp will have a bunch of HDMI inputs and one HDMI output (some really fancy ones have two). You can hook this up two ways, I'll explain my way first.

The way I do it is to run a bunch of HDMI wires into the amp, one from each of your sound-and-video-outputting things, and then run one HDMI wire from the amp to the telly just for video, so the amp will handle the sound and just pass through the video to the telly. So for example you'll run your Playstation into the amp, and your roku box or kodi box or whatever into the amp, and your old blu-ray player into the amp, all on one HDMI wire each, and then one wire from the amp to the AV1 input on the telly, and you'll leave the telly on AV1 with its sound muted and use the amp remote control to swap between devices and adjust volume and sound-related matters. All the telly remote ever does anymore is turn the telly off and on. I do it this way for two reasons, firstly because I've never once hooked my TV up to an antenna or cable since I moved to America because American telly is shit, and secondly because I think smart TVs suck, TVs should just be dumb monitors without any jobs to do and letting the amp switch between inputs fits in more with that vibe. That's how I ended up with a projector instead of a telly, but that's for another post.

The other way is to plug all your devices into your telly and then tell your telly to send the audio out to the amp. If you do it this way, and you manage to get it to work, then you end up controlling the sound volume on the amp with the remote control for the telly. For this to work, the telly has to reliably tell the amp “Volume up” when you point the remote at the telly and press volume up, and that means sending control signals down the HDMI wires. In theory everything should work together in perfect harmony but in reality this is fucking fraught because of specifications and implementations and compatibilities and competing standards and boring boring boring complicated boring shit and in my experience it's a bucket better left unsteppedin, but for you it might work flawlessly first time and never give you any problems at all, it's a diceroll.

Anyway, if you're buying a new amp (new as in, it has HDMI holes), favour one with lots of HDMI inputs. If you can't get one with lots of HDMI inputs but you see one with like one or two, no problem, there are boxes you can plug in to give you more HDMI inputs if you need them, look for a HDMI Selector or a HDMI Switch.

These amps are great and should be your first choice if the opportunity arises. Even the shitty ones are pretty good.

I'm gonna define an old amp as anything that has an optical or digital co-ax audio input, but no HDMI holes, and these were a thing from like the early naughties to the early teens. It'll still call itself a home theatre receiver. If someone's asking for money for one of these, they're taking the piss a little bit - you should be able to find one going begging in many thrift shops.

Optical holes are cool. They're a square hole with a plastic flap and they literally send the signal using pulses of light along a fibre-optic wire, there's no electricity going along the wire, just light. Digital co-ax gets the job done as well, it'll carry the same digital surround sound signal as an optical wire, but it does it the traditional way with electricity out of an RCA-looking hole along a copper wire. A digital co-ax hole will be orange or black but you can use any colour RCA wire, they're all the same inside. Digital co-ax was more of an afterthought and never really caught on 'cause we already had optical and people got it mixed up with all the other audio/video things that used the same size and shape holes, but y'know what, it works, and that's all we care about.

Often there'll be a bunch of old-style analogue video inputs and one set of old-style video outputs. If it's a good amp (old can be good) it'll have component (red, green and blue) video inputs and outputs. If it's a middling amp, it'll have S-video (round hole with lotsa pins). If it's a shite amp (and remember, a shite amp still beats a soundbar) it'll just have composite video inputs, that's the yellow RCA jack, and that's about the level where you stop paying money for these things and start relieving people of their old junk. You won't use any of these video inputs or outputs, unless you're plugging in retro game consoles like PS2 or earlier, these are just here to judge how fancy the amp was when it was new.

How you're gonna hook this up is one of three ways, the first is to hook all your devices into your telly like normal and then run an optical cable out of your telly into the amp and cross your fingers that your telly has the smarts to output surround sound. Try this first, you'll end up with optical cables anyway and it'll cost nowt so you might as well give it a go.

The second way is, you're gonna use a HDMI audio extractor. Remember how I said earlier that HDMI carried video and audio, well, an audio extractor is a little box you get off Amazon for about twenty or thirty bucks. On one side it'll have a HDMI input, and on the other side it'll have a HDMI output and an optical output as well, and it'll squirt the audio from the HDMI wire out of that optical hole and into your amp while passing the HDMI signal through to your telly. You might have to get creative with HDMI selector boxes and shit.

The third way is, if the things you're plugging into your amp all have some kinda sound output independent of their video output like an optical alongside the HDMI hole (which is rare these days), then you'll run the HDMI to the telly and the optical to the amp, and whenever you switch inputs on the telly you'll have to remember to also switch inputs on the amp, or you'll be watching one thing while listening to another.

These amps are a faff to hook up but they'll be super super cheap or free because people with money (meaning, the people who originally bought these things 25 years ago and are now moving them along) generally can't be arsed faffing around to hook them up.

Really old amps are ones with no digital audio inputs at all, only RCA analogue ones with the red and white holes. Some of them can do surround sound (there'll be four or more speaker outputs) and they do this by using Dolby Pro Logic, which is a way to multiplex multi-channel audio through just left and right analogue audio inputs and some special encoding that nothing uses anymore.

Some of them aren't even meant to go anywhere near your telly, you're supposed to plug a CD player or a tape deck or a record player into them. They pre-date the very idea of TV sound coming through amp speakers. They still work for our purposes, because audio is audio, big speakers sound better than little speakers, and big amp circuitry in its own box sounds better than tiny amp circuitry squeezed into the back of your thin skinny telly.

Sometimes these old stereo-only amps can be really really expensive. A really really expensive stereo-only amp isn't for us, it's for hooking up to a record player and getting really good sound on music specificially. They're great, but they're for music, not for movies.

You'll hook this up either by running red and white RCA wires out of your telly and into the amp, or with another HDMI extractor (this one with red-and-white holes, or a 3.5mm headphone jack that you can terminate in red-and-white RCA plugs). Or if you're running retro game consoles or a DVD player.

Two contradictory truths: one, these are not good amps for surround sound, and you definitely shouldn't pay money for one. Two, these are still way fucking better than your TV speakers. If you're just starting out, and you see one of these out on the kerb or in a Buy Nothing facebook group or in the Free Stuff section on Craigslist, by all means snap it up. It's a start. You can always upgrade later on.

Alright that's the amps generally covered, let's do speakers now.

Get two speakers to start. Again, thrift stores, yard sales, Craigslist, facebook marketplace.

Important general things to know about speakers:

• Speakers are a universal technology. This means you don't have to buy home theatre speakers, you can use speakers made for a record player or tape deck and that'll be fine. You don't need to pair Yamaha speakers with a Yamaha amp, any speaker will work with any amp. If the connections are different, you can cut the connectors off and crimp new ones on, no problem.
• Not all your speakers need to be the same, but you do want matched pairs. Like the front two should be the same, the back two should be the same, but the front set and the back set can be different and that'll be alright. If you lucked out and got a fancy amp with the microphone on a wire to do room correction, then the amp will adjust itself so they all sound more or less the same.
• Speaker technology hasn't changed much in our lifetimes. A brand new set of speakers bought from the new-things shop will be different from a twenty-year-old set in that the new ones will smell newer. Speakers that were expensive when they were new thirty years ago but are cheap today, will sound better than cheap speakers made today, so for the same money favour older speakers.
• You don't need speakers that plug into the wall. These are called “Active” speakers, meaning, the amp is built into the speaker and you plug it into a wall outlet to give it power. They're more expensive. We have an amp, we don't need to buy these.
• Get speakers made out of wood if you can, get speakers made out of plastic if they're free, don't pay for plastic speakers.
• Moar bigger is moar gooder. This is just straight-up physics, ain't no replacement for displacement. Don't get me wrong, you'll still have a great time with a pair of bookshelf speakers, especially if you pair them up with a nice big sub, but you'll have an even better time with big lads if you've got the room for them.
• Check for damage. If the grilles come off, take them off and check that the foam around the driver is in good nick, there aren't any cracks or holes in it, and a kid hasn't poked the cone/dustcap in - it'll still work but won't sound as good and might rattle maybe, sometimes you can use sticky tape or a vacuum cleaner to try to suck the cone back out again. If your speaker has a port (this is a hole that lets air come in and out behind the driver) then give it a good shake to see if a kid's put things inside the speaker through the port, if they have then you'll want to take it apart and get those things out.
• If you're buying speakers made in the 21st century then favour speakers with banana plug jacks, these are the finger-sized round jacks we talked about earlier, they're better than the flat square spring-loaded shites and they usually signify that this is gonna be a nicer speaker. These are also called binding posts.
• Give them a listen if you can, but generally if they look alright they're usually gonna sound alright and if it's not too much money then roll the dice. Guys who offer to audition speakers will generally want a little bit more money than guys who just have them on a table.
• Put them on little dabs of blu-tak. This isolates them from whatever surface you put them on and stops that surface resonating. Audiophiles will pay thousands of dollars for special little rubber feet that have been licked by nuns or whatever, or you can use whatever random bit of rubber you have lying around, or blu-tak, same same.
• Check the specs, you want 8-ohm speakers, honestly anything that's not in a car is 95% certainty gonna be 8 ohm, and you can check with a multimeter if you're at all unsure but generally don't worry about it. Check the wattage rating on your speakers (on a label on the back if it hasn't fallen off (it's fallen off)) and compare it to what your amp can put out because it's possible to blow your amp up if you crank it too hard, but if you do blow your amp up, well, you probably just popped a fuse and you can just replace the fuse and keep on trucking, and if you blew up more than the fuse, oh well, it was cheap (if it was a good / expensive amp then it wouldn't have blown up).

Now let's get specific about the speakers. The fronts are the workhorses, the centre enhances clarity, the sub delivers punch and the rears provide magic.

The fronts are the first speakers you'll buy. They might be the last, but probably not. Get ones that look nice, because you and your loved ones are gonna be looking at them. Try to get them equidistant from the telly. There's really not much more to say! If you only have two speakers, make sure to tell your amp (and any devices plugged into it) that you want to output in stereo only.

If you want a subwoofer, there are two sorts, active (also called powered) and passive. Passive ones are for REALLY shit amps, my first one was a passive one, that means the subwoofer is powered by the amp, the amp sends Big Signals to the subwoofer through normal speaker cables and it farts out pathetic little toots of bass. A powered subwoofer has two wires, one to the amp on an RCA lead and one to the wall for mains power, and the amp just sends a signal to the subwoofer and the sub uses its own power, and these are Much Much Better and will thump you in the chest when you watch Sinners and you'll smile and go “This was worth it.” Again, Craigslist, because people upgrade their subs quite often.

Sometimes an active subwoofer will have an annoying little LED on it to tell you that it's on, but that's nothing that a spot of blu-tak or electrical tape can't fix.

Subwoofers are weird in that bass frequencies are weird, the Waves of Bass are far enough apart that you can actually crawl around the floor hearing (and feeling) the sub get stronger and weaker as you move your ears a few inches at a time, so this means there's a Best Place in your room for the sub, if you care that much. Search for “sub crawl” on audiophile forums for a good giggle.

If you have two fronts and a sub, you've got what's called a 2.1 system, like computer speakers but bigger and better, and this is good and plenty and a treat.

The centre speaker is a special case because you need one. And it's hard to buy one speaker, they come in pairs.

The centre speaker is Important because that's where dialogue comes from - most amps have an option to do a “phantom” centre by firing the centre through the left and right simultaneously so they're not strictly necessary, but if you do get one, you should try to make it a good one. Worse, all centre speakers are made specifically for surround sound / home theatre use, so they've got that Rich Man's Toy price premium on them.

But, you can absolutely take a normal speaker and turn it on its side and use that as a centre, that's legit. You might also be tempted to Actually Spend Some Money here, and I won't judge you for it.

If you have two fronts, a centre and a sub, you have a 3.1 system, and you're on your way to being the guy who hosts movie night.

The rears are game changers. I mean literally, for videogames specifically, because you can hear the guy coming up behind you. You can hang the rears Actually Behind You if you've got your sofa in the middle of your room like a weirdo, or you can hang them up high to the left and right if you've got your sofa up against a wall, either will work, check your amp and/or game console and/or specific game settings to see if there's a way to tell it where you've got your speakers positioned.

The rears are gonna be used in movies in different ways. Action movies will have bullets whizzing around behind you, dramas might have rain or bar conversations that sound neat and Like You're Really There, Bollywood musicals will often actually split up the music so some instruments come through the back specifically, and you need to buy Sinners on blu-ray and crank that sucker up and this will all have been worth it.

If you've got two fronts, a centre, a sub and two rears, you've got a full 5.1 system and you're probably gonna be done for a while! Make sure that your amp and all your other equipment knows that you've got all six speakers in play and you want to use them.

Alright so when you've got your ten-dollar thrift store stereo amp, and two old 70's speakers that you found in a dumpster, and you go to plug the whole thing in and wire up these speakers and try to figure out how to hide the wires - run another wire, for later. That'll be for your centre speaker, where the dialogue comes through, and running it now will save you the effort later on, 'cause you've got all the telly pulled out and the wires all over the place and trying to get round the back of the amp etc and it's good to only have to do it once. Cap off the ends of that unused wire so it doesn't short and blow your amp up.

Speaking of wire, don't buy expensive wire, it's a scam - but don't buy the absolute cheapest either, because that's also a scam just in the opposite direction. Wire quality DOES make a difference to sound quality (and analog video quality too), but you hit diminishing returns REALLY quickly. A $10 wire sounds WAY better than a $2 wire, but a $100 wire sounds only very very very almost imperceptibly better than a $10 wire, assuming you've got really really really good equipment. Those are for people with too much money. What you want for speaker wire is a) THICC, as thicc as you can jam in the holes, b) as short a run as you can get away with, c) wired up the right way round, d) one length of wire for each speaker, don't cheap out and try to splice two short spare old odd bits together, e) more or less the same length for each pair of speakers, and f) actually made out of copper, not fucking aluminium painted to look like copper, thanks Amazon. If you lucked out and got rrrrreally nice speakers and amp for cheap then you might have equipment that takes banana plugs, I do recommend you get some terminals and screw them on because it does make everything a bit more convenient (don't worry it's piss-easy and you get to giggle at audiophiles going “I made my own speaker cables!”)

Running wire all over the place doesn't have to look ugly, but it does require some creativity. Basically you've got two choices, either hide the wire or make the wire look pretty. You can hide wire inside drop ceilings or behind bookcases or get plastic cable raceways that stick to the wall and you can paint over them, there's all sorts of products you can buy to hide the wires, or if you're bold then you can make a feature of the wires. This is why it's always good to buy wire that actually looks nice, it gives you that flexibility to either hide it or show it off. Copper wire with transparent insulation looks especially fancy against dark coloured walls. If you're gonna have the wire out in the open then take extra care with parallel runs to make sure that they stay very very straight and parallel, 'cause your eye will be drawn to the slightest wobble. A plumb bob on a string will be helpful for determining vertical there.

For going up walls, use the cable clips that are a P-shaped bit of plastic, where the wire goes in the loop of the P and you drive a screw through a hole in the P's lower bit. They're called cable clips or wire clamps, they're cheap, you can get sets that include both black and white.

You can staple speaker wire to the wall, and it looks good, but I don't like to, it gives me the heebiejeebies electrically-speaking.

Don't try to run wire under your carpet or a rug, no matter how thick the rug or how thin the wire, even if it looks alright when you do it it'll stick out like a sore thumb in a week or two.

So you've got your cheap amp and your two cheap speakers and your playstation or whatever run into your amp via whatever means (hdmi if fancy amp, hdmi to rca/optical splitter box to amp if cheap old amp), you turn it on and it absolutely blows you away, I mean it 100% knocks your socks off, because you're used to the two-inch-wide speakers on the side of your telly - now, sorry to say, you're fucked, because every time you go past a thrift store you're gonna go “I'll just check for speakers.”

Here's some general tips for the hunt.

Remember, the hunt is a major component of the system and metasystem around the system, meaning, a machine of interactions whose job is to produce joy and experience and memories, a machine which has multiple components, and not all of them are physically connected by wire but they're connected nonetheless, some components of this machine aren't physical, they're events. Coming across cool speakers or a cheap big sub by serendipity is an integral part of Raccoon Sound System. This cannot be forced. To force it, by employing large amounts of money in retail establishments, is to abandon serendipity. When you buy a speaker, you remember how you came across it, you remember chatting with the person who sold it to you, a speaker comes with a story. “I bought this off Amazon” is not a story. I came across my current subwoofer on a gorgeously sunny day at a neighbourhood yard sale around my friends' house, and my conversation with its seller was first haggling but then chatting about sound systems and subsequently talking about the films we watched on those sound systems and making recommendations to each other while my spouse and daughter browsed the records up the street, the sun was hot on my hair and the flowers in his yard were vivid red and violet, I remember these things, these memories are part of Raccoon Sound System as a result of the serendipity of finding this subwoofer, there was a sequence of events, a beginning and a middle and a continuation that brings us up to now, a story. The man who sold me my amplifier worked in electronics, he had a wooden cabin house with wooden cabin walls and he had glasses and enjoyed chatting about tube rejuvenators and the amp smelled like his fabric softener for a week or so. My rears came from a lesbian couple in a fancy part of town, they had recently moved and were selling the random things that accompany you on moves even though you don't want them any more, the things that just sort of hang on to you until you find them another place just after winter's turning into spring. My fronts and centre came from a sad man who had lost his job and was moving into a caravan, I had previously haggled with him over email and agreed on a lower price but in the moment I unhaggled and paid him what the ad asked initially, he remained sad because a simple unhaggling can't bring his job back but, just slightly less sad for a moment, the day itself was sad and grey and mud-stone brown puddles in his drive, and he didn't know where the grills were and I told him that was okay because my cats would've scragged them anyway. I sold my old subwoofer while I was recovering from surgery and couldn't actually pick the subwoofer up. I was sat on my front porch, unable to move much, unable to work, nothing to do but recover, and the man who bought it chatted with me for forty five minutes, and we mentioned the sub maybe twice, his family were Irish and he was unable to trace them very far back because people change their names, his wife is early into dementia and he's setting up a nice system to play her some of her favourite music, he wants to go to Wales. It was October but unseasonably warm and his conversation carried away what would have been another hard hour. After he picked the subwoofer up and carried it down to his car, he hesitated at his door, dithering as though he was about to come back up and continue the conversation where we left off, then we waved and he went on his reluctant way.

I bought my speaker wire online and I don't even remember what year I bought it. Do we understand each other?

Anyway. Upgrade one part at a time. Take small, low-stakes gambles, where you won't be too upset if it doesn't work out. ALWAYS CARRY CASH. You never know when you'll pass a yard sale with a pair of big lovely speakers going for an absolute steal and you don't want to be fucking around with Venmo or whatever in that situation.

Be patient. Keep checking craigslist, keep checking thrift stores, don't bother with trendy new websites or boutique shit, hang out where people ten years older than you gather, they're the ones upgrading their systems and letting the old stuff go cheap.

When it's time to move along your old equipment that you've found better replacements for, let them go easily, to the next person whose shoes you once occupied.

This is the route I've taken, 100% committed to The Way Of The Raccoon, and I've very slowly built up a really nice knock-your-socks-off system over the past 15 or so years by Just Generally Keeping An Eye Out.

This is a post about Ryan Coogler's Sinners (2025).