Audio System Donation


About the time I finish putting together my audio system I will be turning 68. Hope I have years of enjoyable listening but I won’t live forever. So I began wondering where to donate both the equipment and my eclectic CD collection in a ‘last will and testament’. No, family members is not an option. Considered a university common room but these days so many students go the rap and hip hop route. Most of my music would be wasted on this generation. Retirement communities, I suspect, would have the opposite issue – too vanilla – with way too few hard blues, fusion jazz and rock listeners at such a quiet place.


Thought I could open up a discussion here to receive reasonable suggestions. “Give it to me” is not a reasonable idea, and I will simply take down this post if people are that selfish or insensitive on this site.


128x128whileicanstillhear
That's a good question that most of us will have to deal with someday. You should be able to find a used record store that will buy whole collections. I have done that. Got rid of a bunch of old records that I did not want. The store bought the whole lot after looking through them to asses the relative value. Most were not worth much but it was a way to unload them without just throwing them in the trash and got a few bucks. Audio equipment can be sold here or taken to a used audio store much like music, you could even just donate it to them. It's to bad you don't have a younger person to hand it down to. That seems to be a common problem these days unfortunately.
Interesting dilemma, I also approaching retirement and although I have thought about it from time to time, I suspect neither offspring would be terribly interested. They either stream from their phones to wireless systems they have, or just through the tv. One is in California the other in Amsterdam so shipping would be exorbitant. Had considered maybe the local library for my CD's (gave up records in College) but as far as hardware my guess is one of them will have to sell it off either piece meal or as a system. Would hope someone would want the smaller components, pre, dsd, cd player. 
One possibility at least for the media side is to catalogue it all on something like discogs.
This gives a rough market value to each album based on sales of said album.
That way at least your estate if it ever came to that, would have some idea on value.
Also helpful if you decide to sell all to a dealer as touted previously, you have a bit of ammunition.
But best scenario is you outlive the equipment!

Enjoy!