Back In the Day

Based on my own experience I would say no, its not. the secondary market was very limited. the local hi end shops you MIGHT be able to buy at 10% off list and they would give you 20 cents on the dollar on your equipment in trade.

No. Back in the day, there were more people interested in audio and FAR less to choose from equipment wise. Today, there is an astonishing amount of gear out there for what would seem to be a shrinking interest base.

Yes, I was doing it, possibly more than now. I went through cartridges like water. Also, several turntables, less amps, and speakers. A lot of it may have been bad record pressings, and recordings. If it was popular, they stamped records out (truckloads?) when they should have scrapped the dies. Nobody complained, they were making nice profits, and the result was poor. I had some albums that I put a lot of hours on. I used to joke that one of these days I may hold it up the the light, and it will show through.

Then I found a couple of them in the old closeout section of a store years later, and was thrilled. One day I opened them to see how much better they would sound. Big disappointment. They sound like they were played day after day on a cheap jukebox, or were played on a bad changer. I tried them on different tables ( arms,cartridges too) and the same result. I gave them time to break-in, and they never sounded as good as the worn out ones I had. They must have been stamped on super high hour dies.

In about the '90s, I had ended up about at least a half of a dozen of audio friends, even more with the out of town/state ones, finally, more time and money. We bought and swapped a ton of all kinds of audio gear for years. It was a lot easier, with a lot of us involved. Finally settling down some, at least I hope.

Back in the day I learned about the Shibata Stylus in an effort to reduce surface noise on records. I was also upgrading equipment and experimenting with cables.

I think that this phenomenon of churning equipment goes hand-hand with the internet taking off i.e. the public has ready & easy access to a used & new equipment market that it did not have in 1980s. Plus, the number of manuf in each segment (amps, preamps, cables, TTs, etc) has grown many-fold & customers want to try out more/diff gear all the time.....
In the 1980s the methodology to buy equipment was much diff - it was a face-face transaction. Not so now!

Now, you buy from some user name, if you like it you keep it otherwise put it back up for sale....