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

let's face it, with time the great sounding old designs become progressively more obsolescent, and to keep paying higher and higher prices for them becomes foolish.  they must have a distinct investor grade quality to keep climbing in value, i.e. they must retain or gain in value, to be worth buying.  when the prices start to drop, that's the signal it's not an investment, rather it's just a trend that has been played out, or it's been surpassed by newer developments in technology and sound.  I'm seeing this same phenom in everything vintage or antique.  what drives the prices up to the sky is big money getting interested in buying it, and when that wanes, the prices can only go down.  all these cheap knock-off Chinese-made tube amps don't help any. hopefully we can get nasty tariffs on them all, and then you'll see vintage tube gear pick up again.

@grannyring 

I suspect you are correct about the declining market ( but only for current technology type high end products)

Maybe tekton is disruptive and hopefully there will be technologies and products that reinvigorate the market.

Following up on your comments about Tekton and/or others pricing new products reasonably....from a buyer perspective, knowing that 50% depreciation is likely, most buyers would rather suffer a $1500 loss over a $15k loss... obviously.

For now, I suspect that most buyers can only afford to buy the expensive stuff if they can get it as a preowned at a pretty good discount. 

IMO used equipment prices are too high. Generally you're not going to get 80% for a used item although I'll admit there may be exceptions.

I don't know. I lost my system in storage about 2009, or maybe 2010, and just recently got back into it. 

FIRST thing I noticed is that the used stuff I was used to back then was selling for either the same prices or more, sometimes MUCH more than they were. 

Other thing I noticed, was prices for "state of the art" were much, MUCH higher. 

Some of this I think is inflation...obviously, 4k in the 90's would be maybe 8k today. And the cost to build, say, a Mac MR78 tuner would be more than it was, so one would expect used prices to go up along with new prices. 

I don't consider 1/2 of retail or new "giving away"...1/2 of retail is normal for just about anything used (dealers and suppliers have to have profit, that's just how the world works). 

From what I see, HEA is as healthy as I've ever seen it.

The other thing, maybe a different subject, is mainstream music seems to be streamed. The general public is FAST moving in this direction, and so, to a point, stereo systems are becoming out of date to most homes. 

This reminds me a LOT of the CD revolution, which was a real boost to HEA, really saved it in a way. Folks traded in their record players for CD's, HEA companies put lots of effort into making better CD players, even to compete with the quality of record players. Many while "upgrading" rediscovered record players...the whole thing got a boost, and EVERYTHING got better. 

Now I see products making efforts to compete streaming "up to" the quality of the lowly CD. Who all here has streaming that sounds as good as your CD player? Better? How much did it cost? 

My visits "back" to the stereo shops, systems are for more expensive, lots of streaming components for sale, some very expensive, and the sound coming from the streamers at a lower level of quality. 

Deja Vu! last time it was like this, the HEA revolution was just about to start up (again).