What's Worth More on the Open Market - Your Records or Your Audio Gear

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the 25 movie soundtracks I sold won’t look like much in a rack. But displayed like this

https://retrorenovation.com/2013/04/01/record-album-cover-art/

in a Home Theater Room.

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@bdp24
If the house were burning down, and I had to choose which to save, no contest. The eq can be easily replaced, the music not.

So Eric ...if you were given just one opportunity to go in and grab an arm load - say 100 records - one cube of an Ikea Expedit.

Do you know which you would Grab? Anyone ?

or does one get so confused in a situation like this - too many choices - and you end up just grabbing your hopped up , tricked out preamp - phono stage....? I can't lift my turntable kit by myself.  8^(

Gear, by a lot. I have what, some 3000 LPs - with not too much junk, and most of which I like/love. It’s certainly enough to where I’m not repeating the same plays too often - and just about large enough for gems to sometimes go into hiding and gloriously reemerge later on! But the main system (which has been vinyl exclusively for a while) does cross that 6-fig threshold, so there’s no way my vinyl collection gets close. I’m very happy with both my gear and music collections, and I’ll continue to acquire new vinyl. But not TOO much more, without culling - I’m afraid a much larger collection would get too unwieldy in my living space.

If I value LPs and CDs at $5 per item (probably optimistic), I come up with $35,000.  That is a little bit more than the value of the midrange drivers in my speakers, so I am way into the gear side.

Actually a rare records cost a lot, a typical value for a rare Soul 45s is $100-300 each and it is only a middle price, some cost way over thousands for a single 7 inch. Some of them were $1-5 in the 90’s set sale lists, but with the internet auctions prices for rare stuff only goes up every year. Since the majority of them pressed only in small quantities on independent labels in the 60s/70s they are hard to find indeed. And the records that only exists in a handful of copies cost many thousand dollars. Sales statistic available for everyone on popsike.com for all genres of music.

Top quality vintage audio gear also not getting cheaper, but the price for a nice cartridges and stuff is pretty much like a price for a single rare record.

Anyway there are still plenty of cheap gear and cheap records.

The price for a record depends on it’s rarity. Record collectors are ready to pay over $1k for a record than for audio equipment and they don’t believe they are able to hear a difference between the cheap and expensive cartridges. But the rare record (original press only) is a collectible item and music is universal language.

A price for a very rare record does not affected even if there is a re-issue available for $20, collector does not care about re-issues at all, only originals. Just like art, nobody cares about digital re-prints, original can cost a million dollars.