What's up with the price of Vintage equipment?

I can say with absolute certainty that my vintage gear holds it own with the rest of my gear. It’s just different. Everything has it’s own sound and I keep the stuff I really like. The vintage gear is going nowhere!

 

i think exctly the same...

People who own 20,000 bucks amplifier and speakers or costly headphone cannot approve, if they did they will be in the obligation to admit that sound quality is not linearly related to price tags... It will be embarassing and contradictory to their choices...This is why there exist negative opinions about vintage...

People BELIEVE in technical progress forgetting that companies are ruled by profit first not by S. Q. ideals and technological innovations at all cost...

My Sansui amplifiers so good they are can be replaced by today technology at way higher cost  but not my AkG K340 at any cost ... There exist no headphone as it is designed  because it is too costly to design a new one and impossible to make a good profit margin designing one ... His soundfield experience is UNIQUE... Like it or not...

The really annoying thing is when someone tacks "Vintage" onto a piece of crap Radio Shack receiver (or MCS, or Lloyd's or even Emerson) and hikes up the price.  But there will also be some clueless "hifi enthusiast" that will post that Radio Shack stuff was some of the best.

@jhnnrrs Just wait until Crosely's and its crappy ilk start having vintage tacked to them.  You're going to pull your hair out!  Honestly, though, it's nostalgia with the latest generation and the really pricey stuff, I'll assume a lot of it is people who were around back then and couldn't afford it and now they can.  But like the proverbial adage:  It's worth what people will pay for it.

@vitussl101 nailed it.  I was a freshman in high school in 1972. I and my buddy lusted after high end gear.  I had a Harmon Kardon 430 as my first "good" receiver, a Phillips turntable with highly cool (for the time) LED touch sensor buttons, and Electrovoice speakers.  I moved to Phase Linear separates in 1977.  I think that the yearning for vintage gear is based largely on nostalgia for the gear many lusted after in our youth.  I find it hard to believe that my old '70's gear can come close to my current system.  That would mean that all of the claimed improvements in wire, circuit design, capacitors, transistors, power supplies etc, through the present are meaningless, something I find hard to believe.  So if the vintage craze is field by nostalgia, pay whatever you think its worth.  If you are looking for great sound by today's standards, I would be surprised if vintage gear would be competitive.  Take ARC for example.  Many claim that the ARC REF 6, no slouch in the modern preamp department, is greatly improved by the new improvements to the SE version.  So from 1974 through the present, the REF 6SE isn't a big improvement over the ARC 1974 preamps?  Hard to believe.

So I was in Des Moines Iowa a few weeks back taking care of funeral arrangements for a relative.  While there I stopped into a place called Skylabs Audio in a kind of eclectic shopping area in Valley Junction, a vintage audio dealer.  The owner makes dozens of videos on YouTube so I thought what the hell, it was Saturday, check it out.  Very small, a one showroom operation with a small collection of stuff.  The shoppers were mainly young and I spoke to a few, basically looking for their first stereo system(kudos to them) and buying new and used records.  They told me that there's not to much choice in Des Moines for real audio equipment  What surprised me was they had playing a Yamaha 2020 receiver and Advent speakers.  My older brother has these in college and I remember back then how much I loved his system.  Today?  I don't know, $1500.00 for the receiver and I don't remember the speaker's price but you're talking about two grand and change.  I could definitely do much better today with that amount.