Yes, the size of the market continues to age and ebb away. It’s not gonna get any easier. In fact with the economy rolling right now, this may be as good as it gets by far.
Some new blood is coming up from the high-end headphone crowd, but it’s not feeding into 2ch staples like speakers and monoblocks (maybe just DACs, at best). And Audiogon lost a good chunk of its traffic to the site rewrite some years ago -- older folks don’t like to adapt to tech, and get easily/permanently frustrated. Maybe they should’ve kept both systems up while they refined the new site (which I do like, now that the bugs have been worked out).
But also, a lot of sellers don’t seem to have a clue that they’re pricing items way too high. You gotta be realistic, and the #s you find in the BlueBook/etc are often FAR off a sellable price. And the worst trap is getting stuck holding the bag with at item that was a "flavor of the month" flash in the pan. A couple years on, and you may find you can’t even give it away.
Some new blood is coming up from the high-end headphone crowd, but it’s not feeding into 2ch staples like speakers and monoblocks (maybe just DACs, at best). And Audiogon lost a good chunk of its traffic to the site rewrite some years ago -- older folks don’t like to adapt to tech, and get easily/permanently frustrated. Maybe they should’ve kept both systems up while they refined the new site (which I do like, now that the bugs have been worked out).
But also, a lot of sellers don’t seem to have a clue that they’re pricing items way too high. You gotta be realistic, and the #s you find in the BlueBook/etc are often FAR off a sellable price. And the worst trap is getting stuck holding the bag with at item that was a "flavor of the month" flash in the pan. A couple years on, and you may find you can’t even give it away.