Renewing my components stash

There's an old electronics shop in my neighborhood that will soon getting closed and now they're offering special deals before closing.
So I'm thinking it's a good opportunity for getting a stash of components before I'll need to order everything by mail.
What would you say would be the most commonly electronic components used in audio circuits as far as op amps , transistors or any other parts / components that is good to have ?

From an old electronics ship? get enclosures and switches. Big mechanical things that you'll need.
Aliexpress/Amazon can get you opamps or general purpose transistors for switching LED's etc, but things like enclosures, switches, meters etc are expensive to buy and to ship from around the world.
Can't go wrong by sprinking on a few NE5532, NE5534, TOL074, TL072, LM317's, LM337's, LM7805, 7815, 7915, PN2222A's, J111's if they have them,.

I'll add to the list as I think of them.

If you don’t have most of the E96 resistor values I would take his stash.

Do they have a tube inventory?

Thanks for your suggestions.
It seems like this shop has opened by late 70's / early 80's.
For many years they don't have tube inventory but they have a lot of solid state and other more modern components is stock.
As far as components quality most of they're stock is more "general purpose" than high quality audio components.

I would pass on old electrolytic caps but film caps and resistors are probably good.

Hopefully the leads are clean and not tarnished which could make them hard to solder.

Old LEDs are probably lower efficiency than modern/later ones (older is not better for LEDs).

Some obscure old semiconductors may be good for repairs, but shop owner may know what was valuable and already traded it away.

Happy hunting.. I have parts in my back lab from that long ago... and one bag of low noise transistors I haven't been able to locate for over ten years. 

JR

JohnRoberts said:

Hopefully the leads are clean and not tarnished which could make them hard to solder.

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I use some 600 grit paper on the leads of old components like this. cleans them up nicely for soldering without removing the plating on the legs.

Old LEDs are probably lower efficiency than modern/later ones (older is not better for LEDs).

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Older is sometimes better. If you have to replace dead leds on an old mixing desk & you use modern ones they look like laser beams in comparison to the older ones. I have a stash of older ones I use on my MCI for this reason.

Go for the film capacitors, if they sell them for a good price, buy all the values

Resistors above 1W I would get a lot of values,  but resistors of 1/2w or 1/4w I would just buy them if they were precision metal film. Probably they're not, they're probably carbon composition 5% tolerance

I'd take most obsolete FET's and some small signal transistors. Toshiba, fi. Maybe they still have some germanium transistors? LDR's?

Film caps can go bad over time though, I've had instances of both polypropylene and styroflex caps from the 80s that went south.

living sounds said:

Film caps can go bad over time though, I've had instances of both polypropylene and styroflex caps from the 80s that went south.

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Anything can happen to any component but that's not something common.

I would still advise on buying a pretty good stock of film caps.

living sounds said:

Film caps can go bad over time though, I've had instances of both polypropylene and styroflex caps from the 80s that went south.

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I don't recall problems with polypropylene but can imagine them being heat stressed in a passive loudspeaker crossover.

Polystyrene caps are not very robust. I had a business partner trash a bunch of them trying to clean off PCBs with a high pressure air hose, blowing water inside the polystyrene caps.    We don't see polystyrene used in mass production manufacturing because of their poor capability at handling typical high process temperatures. 

Polystyrene is a very nice dielectric for audio, and OK for hand soldering (I used them in my kit business back in the 70s), but be careful handling them.

JR