Best purchases: Apex 460 tube mic. In terms of bang-for-buck and frequency of use, great purchase. AKG d12. Lovely kick mic. Fireface. Freeing me from the blue-screen filled world of Aardvark. Soundworkshop Logex 8 & studiomaster 8 into 4 consoles. Nice front ends for drum recordings. I once got a vox ac50 at an estate sale for $5, with the sticker "fire hazard" on it. Needed a retube and a new output transformer, but sounds amazing. Behringer Vamp2. Still going strong 6 years or so later, still gets a good deal of use.
Worst purchases: AKG D112. One of the few mics I've sold just to get rid of. Horrible, clicky sounding kick mic. Behringer Bass Vamp pro. With how much I like the guitar version, I figured the bass version would be a great compliment, and might be a nice addition to the mobile rig. Totally useless. And I'm a bassist. Considering I prefer a plain DI to an amp for bass recording, maybe this is just me. Monster prolink 500 snake cable I got at employee cost from a friend. Even with the employee discount (of about 80% off retail, for those who think you get what you pay for
), it was still the absolute worst cable I've ever worked with. Should have bought the mogami (or belden, canare, gepco...) at retail (which was only about 10% more than the 'discounted' monster cable).