Anybody having trouble getting near-your-asking-price for used gear ? (Plz. no hype)


I buy and sell gear "on a whim" and have done so for 40 years. Mostly high-end tube stuff that I get an itch to move from my rig to make room for other high-end stuff that I have been dreaming of.  It's fun and gives me a fresh faces to fall in and out of love with.

Lately I am having a really hard time getting any serious offers above 1/4 to 1/3 of retail- actually zero offers over that. And winter is the time of year gear sells. Once the sun comes out things get really quiet.  Not terribly long ago I could ask 50% of retail and get serious offers pretty close to the ask.  

I am especially having trouble selling ARC gear. It's prices are steadily collapsing. On HiFi Shark that stuff sits for close to a year (or more) before it moves.  For example SP 15s are under 2K now. They were selling (not asking) at 3K a year ago. It took me almost a year to sell a new-in--box I/50 for $3000 (!)   Ref 75s are moving under $3000 and TMR will only offer 2K for one of them. The older stuff is selling in the hundreds not the thousands. Top-Of the-line stuff like Reference 10 preamps are moving under 12K (asking is around 17K) 

I recently sold a Bryston BR-20 brand new in the box and it took me 7 months to get 48% of MSRP.  This is NEW stuff- not somebody's junk. 

My guy at Magnepan told me their stuff is really moving slowly as well. He blamed it on the political environment. ARC is pretending all is well but I have a little birdie inside there that tells me their stuff is stagnant as and dealers are actually cancelling orders. 

Now, assuming you are being honest and not "fluffing the market" with bullbleep because you have something for sale and hoping for the greater fool,  are you seeing/experiencing the same thing I am experiencing? 

NO RETAILERS PLESASE- you guys tend to "exaggerate" to put it kindly- plus most of us here at AG know who you are and your 1000s of posts are a big clue. 

Signed/ Depressed about my favorite side gig. 

128x128Ag insider logo xs@2xyesiam_a_pirate

Same here, dropped my price to less than half and still no bites.    I think Covid and inflation have really hurt most people's disposable income.   

I thought they would have been an easy sell.

People are also alarmed by economic instability.  With the stock market tanking and trade wars in our midst, dropping megabucks on a used piece of audio gear doesn’t strike many of us as a prudent move.

  I wonder if the consumers of used vs new high end gear are two different groups of buyers.  If I had Elon Musk bank account I wouldn’t be buying used. Less exalted  wealth status dwellers might be more interested in buying and reselling high end gear and be more concerned that they generate enough of a return on used equipment to maintain the sustainability of their ability to keep churning 

.....yes and the fact that the last two sales I had here on Audiogon, the sellers conveniently  '' forgot '' to add the Pay - Pal fees when that was clearly marked in my add and I was picking up shipping. This was also after asking for a lower price.....watch for that trick.    

.......my big mistake the ;  '' Buyers nicely forgot '' to include the Pay- Pal fees.    

One great thing about Google is how it dredges up ads for long-since-sold gear.

Not infrequently, you see circa-2000 gear commanding less money in 2010 (when it was 10 years old) than the ask today, at 25 years old, in 2025.

Is it possible that the current market trend is simply a reversal to the mean?