[Jeffhs]

Some folks will throw out perfectly good items if they have no use for them, or if they want to get them out of the house in a hurry. I admit having done just that with a 6-foot-high shelf unit and an entertainment center cabinet I had used at my former home; the reason I just put them out for the trash was that I simply had no room for either item in my apartment (I had just moved here) and I didn't want to wait to find someone to take them off my hands. I also did this with my 22-year-old (at the time, year 2000) Zenith 12-inch solid-state b&w portable TV, which was still making an excellent picture and had a very strong CRT at the time. Someone may have found the set and put it to good use shortly after I put it by the trash barrels for the apartment building, as I noticed it was gone the next day.

BTW, I was glad to read that the problem with the Vizio HDTV was just water that somehow got into the screen, between the safety glass and the LCD panel itself; now you have a fully functional HDTV. It was also good that the set was rescued from the rain before it became too soaked; otherwise, the motherboard and other PC boards inside the set may have been ruined. The speaker cones may have been warped, unless they are of the type that uses some other material for the cones. The speakers weren't mentioned here, however, so they probably escaped serious damage.

FWIW, I wouldn't have been concerned about the condition of the speakers, even if they did suffer warped cones or other damage. Most HDTVs have small transistor-radio speakers anyway, which do not do justice to the set's MTS stereo decoder and other parts of the audio system. I would just connect a pair of amplified speakers to the set's headphone jack, or connect the TV's audio directly to an external audio system.