High End is Dead?


Browsing used audio sites such as Audiogon and the Marts, high end gear ads are dominated by several dealers. Non-dealer ads are usually people trying to push 15+ year old off-brand junk at 60-70% of MSRP (when they were new). They don't sell anything. You could slash Wilsons, Magicos, etc, 50% off retail and no one will buy them.

No one buys if it costs more than 1k. It's not that they're not interested -- the ads get plenty of views. It's that the asking prices are just way over the ability of buyers to pay. Fact is, if you see a high end piece for sale it's probably by a dealer, often times trying to push it at 15% off retail because its a trade in, but also often they are taking a good chunk off the price 30, 40 sometimes 50% off. They can be famous brands with a million positive reviews. No buyers.

Are we just poor, and that's all there is to it? 
madavid0
I don’t think HEA will disappear, but I do think less people care about it than a generation ago.  When I was in school in the seventies there were a lot of people preoccupied with having a good system.  Check in with most of those people fifteen years later and and they had moved on from their starter systems but with the preoccupation with work and family, rarely listen to their floor standing speakers.  Check in with them 10 years later and the floorstanders have either been replaced by “Lifestyle Products” or nothing at all.  The younger Generation uses earbuds.  All of them are appalled when they find out that my system may have cost me 30 K to assemble, and around this site that sum is what people spend on power cords.
  So the HEA will persist, but probably by trying to extract ever more revenue from the True Believers and ignoring the rest, leading to a further bifurcation between audiophiles and the rest of the world
I forget the actual product, but there's a recent commercial for an app where this Gen Z actor is simply hitting buttons on the tablet screen to create a tune. Said buttons are marked "Bass", "Strings", Vocals", etc. and they all correlate to an existing backbeat, again chosen from a menu of backbeats.

The whole thing (on the commercial at least) sounds engaging and catchy, even as it's just a mouse in a musical maze bragging about which direction she's choosing.

With music becoming more and more codified and ephemeral, it's no surprise HEA is starting to age out.
'If this statement hits too close to home then you might consider getting up out of your specially crafted chair that is both comfortable and yet not so absorptive as to damage the soundstage of that 1958 recording bootlegged out of that acoustically challenged lower Manhattan basement club of a heroin addicted clarinetist playing the 100th version of some show tune.'


Ouch!