What's happened to the used high end market recently?? Sales are tough....:0(

I’d like to throw out one more concern on the resale topic... if you scan the items for sale on audigon, then scan a bunch of threads...what you may notice is the same 100-200 names... not a very big pool of regulars who might be potential buyers.... which then pulls more buyers and sellers to eBay, Craig’s List, etc. which seem to be lower price alternatives.  

Vintage sales are hotter than ever on eBay. You name it Pioneer, SAE, Technics Pro, Nakamichi, Yamaha,  Sansui silver are selling like hotcakes. They're priced "right" according to condition and market demand. Prices remain in the realm of blue collar salaries, and not the stratosphere as some of these lunatic marketing types would have you believe at the trade shows. Frankly I can't understand how HEA has stayed relevant as long as it apparently has. There is no great enigma at work here. Give the public what it wants and they will come.
  

All I know for sure,that last year was a outstanding year for me to sale 50k worth of unneeded gear going fwd and purchase 2 nice pair of speakers for 1/3 of new price that will be keepers for a very long time.
The used hea markets have dropped even more in one yrs time and I certainly wouldn’t want to try and sale anything now,might as well just give it away.

Enjoy,
Kenny.

@kdude66

Kenny, you would probably being doing people a big favor if you gave more details on where you sold your gear, what % of the retail price you ended up with and any other tweaks that might be helpful

@jmcgrogan2 thank you for your comments, John.  Hope all is well back in the Philly area...

You bring up excellent points on the internet and the state of society.  Obviously, the web turned most retail businesses on their ear.  My previous point was the rising price trajectory of one to two orders of magnitude crippled what we used to considered the audiophile world, and shrank it more than proportionally. Though the internet rose at the same time, I don't blame that on HEA's decline, as it could (should?) have actually grown the hobby. Personally, I'm surprised this many brands have survived until today.

Of course, you may disagree with how I see things...

I saw the internet change high-end audio in several ways.  The information explosion provided sources far beyond the two magazines.  The many internet publications, forums like Audiogon, and email allow us to discover and discuss brands, setup, experience, etc. we often had little to no previous knowledge of.  We transcended the days of relying on the advice of friends and local dealers, with this newfound access to these brands and their personnel yielding almost instant satisfaction compared with the days of sitting down to write and send off an actual letter or the once expensive long-distance telephone call.  Going the other way, it allowed the mom and pop or one man band audio companies to compete on a more level than ever playing field with the bigger names in the industry by providing low to no cost advertising and the ability to interact with a nationwide and even worldwide customer base, and to even bypass the need to build a dealer network via direct sales and eCommerce.  Except for a very few companies that guarded geographic integrity, buyers now interacted with a far greater dealer circle and used component wells.  All of this increased price competition on components to something that just didn't exist. 

Still, component pricing took off on a level that we could not have imagined 20 years ago.  Back then, most considered a $4K speaker the investment of a more than dedicated audiophile.  Somewhere around 5 years ago, I almost fell off my chair when I read a post here lamenting the flaws of a product, "you just can't get that good a speaker for $35K."  Things have only gotten more expensive since.  Call me out of touch with current reality, but I still believe one can buy an awfully good loudspeaker for $4K, though that now often has to come from the used market.

Anyway, in the past decade, I've turned the other way.  Having access to now afford the kind of things in life we used to dream of as younger men, I find less fulfillment, and even disappointment in the bigger, more expensive, garish item, audio and otherwise.  It's a rare component, loudspeaker, cable built to impress that actually satisfies me.  I feel happier and hear more music and soul in the simple typical 10 - 50 watt tube amplifiers than those with more than 100 watts, or additional and complex circuitries designed to take care of myriad supposed issues.  I could say the same for loudspeakers, etc., but the point has been made