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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....
daveyf
michaelgreenaudio's avatar
michaelgreenaudio
1,019 posts
 

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

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
2,249 posts
 
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.
craigl59
307 posts
 
+1 mulveling
mr_m
1,900 posts
 
Millennials. I don't think many of them buy new or used HEA. The older generation audiophiles are dying off. Most of the younger generation I talk to have little to no interest in HEA. They like music mostly of the portable variety and seem to listen more as a distraction than anything else. I do believe there are a few younger ones out there that like HEA, but no where near enough to support the hobby. JMHO.
mapman's avatar
mapman
23,060 posts
 
High end audio may also have a bit of a credibility problem especially with newbies given some of the nonsense that goes around in forums like this.  This can't help. 
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