Dover, you are such a Sherlock Holmes, so I must be a millionaire according to your private investigation, bravo. How many cartridges per month do I sell, please tell me? I want you to recall my audiogon buyers, please. It’s funny to read you comment, because you see me as a businessman and blame me for something.
Let me tell you that audiogon is the worst platform for business, especially for vintage cartridges, if you think you can post something about cartridge and sell it next day privately you are naive like a 17 year old kid. I believe Raul and others posted about most of the cartridges in existence about 10 years ago.
Even if I can sell a few cartridges on audiogon (just like everyone on this forum), how does is correlate to my opinion about my best cartridges? Does it makes them bad or what? Or does it makes me dishonest about anything I posted? Very few people from audiogon asked me to sell a cartridge over the years, but many people asked for advice.
I have a good friend in Tokyo and there are a lot of work off-line to get some of the rarest NOS cartridges in perfect condition for my personal collection of the best vintage MM and MC. It’s my passion.
If you think you can get them online you are again naive like 17 y.o. kid. What you can get online in Japan is used cartridges listed as “junk” from the seller who can’t test them, and this is a blind deal, you know. Often kids sell their father’s or grandfather’s carts, but they have no clue what it is and don’t know how to grade them even if the cantilever is broken, they can’t make even a good pictures.
But audiophile scene is very strong in my county, some of the rarest stuff already here (speakers, cartridges, amps etc). If you search you will find them in Russia. And you probably missed those Japanese auctions 15 years ago (when the prices were 5 times cheaper).
What I like to do locally is to bring my mid priced vintage cart (and modern phono stage) for a demo for friends in their system. Once they hear it they want to throw away their inexpensive Ortofon, Grado, Nagaoka, AT ...
Local folks in my age, who are deep into music, doesn’t care about digital at all, they want vinyl. I’m happy to be surrounded by younger people who collect records (not files).
As been said before audiogon is for people over 60, but I’m 44.
I see a huge difference in preferred media format between people of different age.
