I am posting today to warn others of a scam or fraud I was just brought into. I have just purchased a Nagra tube dac from Joshua Schor and was asked to pay via friends and family and definitely was a bit skeptical but did see his positive reviews from other buyers so I went ahead and paid per his request as I wanted the dac. I didn’t look past the first few sales to find that he normally dealt in very inexpensive products. His last couple sales have been selling much higher level gear supposedly for a “friend with many systems”. I have strong doubts that any of this is true as I’ve received a broken and very well used product (30,000 hours on unit and original tube) dac which was $16,000 paid plus another $300 for shipping. The reason I say I’ve got doubts is because as soon as I powered it on the meter needles were out of whack and not reading as all of my other Nagra components and dacs have in the past, I immediately sent the seller video and pictures of the issue.. after further testing I realized it was the entire left channel that was dead. I immediately told the seller Joshua Schor that I needed a return label and a refund and instead he told me he’s reach out to the actual owner where I messaged him again “this is a broken unit and not as described, I need a return label and a refund.” He then instead directed me to Ricardo Reyes of Musical Artisans in Chicago where the package had actually been shipped out from. It is safe to say that Ricardo is the one selling the dac and neither of them have offered to return the unit and have now so far casted blame on the shipping company (box wasn’t damaged whatsoever and Nagra packs very well) then after discovering that the unit had an original tube Ricardo offered to order me another tube but since I have 6-7 other Nagra pieces of gear I actually had a factory Nagra tube on hand that I was able to insert. This lead to an email stating that “they would have sent me a call tag but since the unit had been serviced by an unauthorized Nagra tech they cannot”. The whole situation stinks from day one, the listing was pulled as soon as they received my money and the seller immediately offered to send me some Argento cables to try out which I looked at price and quickly declined, then the sent another email stating “it’s fine, try them and if you don’t like you can send them back”.. I was already a bit surprised at that point that as I have no relationship whatsoever with this seller that he would just send me $5k-$10k worth of silver cables but now that is all starting to make sense as they clearly knew what condition the dac was in and it seems they wanted to pawn off their unpopular and hard to sell used cables to offer as a concession for me keeping their non-functional and faulty dac. I will be proceeding with legal filings and I have still not been offered a return or any type of compensation. I reached out to Rene at Nagra who was very helpful although he said it’s difficult to guess how much the repair bill might be but could be in the $2-$5k range for a starting reference to go to Switzerland for either caps or an overhaul.
I buy and sell and get to try lots of good gear like many of us do and i have never experienced such unprofessionalism by another in the hifi community. I paid for a 9/10 excellent condition piece of hifi and I received a broken unit. I should not be the one to worry about service or sending out of country or anything like that, that is 100% the sellers problem. The fact that the actual seller has gone dark and the 3rd day has passed with no results I’ve now been directed to Ricardo who obviously leads me to know that this was his dac in the first place. This shop isn’t taking liability for but instead casting blame on owner, then it’s the seller and then FedEx and then it’s my fault.. this is clearly worn out and broken piece of gear.
