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


The heading says it all!! What do you guys think is the reason that the sales in the used high end market have gone soft??
Prices too high? Economy too slow?? Stock market too volatile?? Something else??

Thoughts....
128x128daveyf
Depends upon what you mean by "recently".  Seems like it has been a buyer's market for several years now, and perhaps worsening with time.  Has it gotten much worse particularly lately?
Has been discussed regularly on Audiogon. Here are some prior responses/thoughts:
1. Culture places less importance on musical activities, thus less demand for HEA
2. Listening has migrated to streaming and quality is sometimes unavailable, sometimes not of interest
3. Listening styles have moved away from demanding content (such as classical and jazz) to pop and hip hop that requires less HEA
4. Americans have less disposable income (paid your health bill recently?)
5. Younger generations are visually oriented and prefer video games over straight listening sessions
6. And get ready for the "no everything is great and HEA is thriving like never before" responses -- worthwhile checking to see if these are made by industry people...

The HEA of the 80's can't realistically survive in 2018-forward. It's decline has been happening since the mid 90's, no surprise here. I can't imagine folks thought the over built over priced hobby was going to interest the modern Audiophile.

Audiophiles are getting out of the trophy collecting and into their listening, movies, games or whatever. I'm seeing an increase in the hobby, just not the way over the top build hobby. It's not the early 90's where the magazines pulled off that amazing revolving door of plug & play. That was insane, literally! The pitch was "My system doesn't sound right so I'll buy another component". That's pretty crazy but they managed to sucker folks into it. Now after a couple of decades of that (whatever that was), hobbyist are not buying into it anymore, why should they?

Michael Green

www.michaelgreenaudio.net

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.