Buying used vs. New

Tvad, I admit I am confused after reading your post. You say I need more education in what constitutes a market, and then the entire rest of your post agrees with what I have said in mine, just with different wording. You and I are saying the exact same thing really, I think. The confusion lies in how the term market is being used. Let me give a couple of examples. Say you have a rabid collector of something, it doesn't matter what, who is missing only one item from a complete set. This person will almost certainly be willing to pay a price far higher than most buyers for that missing item. Does this drive up what people call the market price for that item in general? No. To use a more specific audio example, say you have a very rich person who likes to buy the latest and greatest new product. He pays full price for each new item he buys, but turns around and almost immediately sells it for far less than he paid for it, perhaps as little as a tenth of what he originally paid, because something newer and supposedly better just came out. Does the way this person operates set a standard for the rest of the market prices? Again, no. These kinds of people are not doing their buying and selling based on the market price, and could care less about the market price, and these are extreme examples of what I mean when I say the market does not determine every price. Every buyer and every seller are different, which we certainly agree on, and on the internet you get all kinds of buyers and sellers in the same marketplace. What you are calling the market price changes on almost a daily basis for many items, and different markets have different prices. Prices on audiogon can be very different from those on ebay, for very different reasons. Every user of these sites has seen incredible prices, both good and bad, on both. In this constantly changing world of prices, which I have observed in the audio world very closely for a while now, I have found that very general 50% mark to hold up over the long term. Even here on audiogon, where buyers are normally willing to pay a little more because they know they are buying from reputable sellers, this is still very often the case. I have seen a great many used items listed on this site much higher than that, and almost all of those prices eventually come down, and many of those that don't never do get sold. On ebay, this would be even more true. Many buy it now prices are so high that they don't even get sold, unless to a buyer truly desperate for that item, and us audiophiles have probably all been that buyer at some point. I know I have, for a certain recording I couldn't find in a store for over 20 years and then it suddenly popped up on ebay. But normally, unless the item is very collectible, or a hard to find vintage item, or the seller has a reserve that is set too high, most often auctions for a used item don't go much above 50% of the original retail price on ebay. There are of course very frequent exceptions - I am talking about long term trends. In this sense, the market does set a price range - but it does not set ALL prices, and the prices it sets one week can be completely different the next, as any regular visitor to ebay knows. There are always exceptions to every rule. I may not define a market and how it operates the same way you or do, and almost certainly not as an economist would, but that is just semantics. I have watched the used high end audio market for a long time now, and I stand by what I have said about it. For most items (not all), a great many people don't usually pay more than half the original retail. You just don't have to if you do your homework and have enough knowledge about the particular item you want to buy (as I think you said yourself in one of your earlier posts), and this is true over the long term regardless of the average price range the market is setting at any given time, or of how it may temporarily fluctuate. So that is why I still advise the original poster that he doesn't have to pay above that mark for most used items if he doesn't want to, and I know many audiophiles and collectors of all sorts would agree.

Learsfool, your core statement is that one should be able to buy any piece of
audio gear at 50% of retail if one does their homework.

I disagree, and nothing you have said persuades me otherwise.

Furthermore, if your point of reference is primarily E-Bay transactions, then it
is completely understandable to me that you do not have enough experience
buying or selling higher end items found primarily on Audiogon that would
commonly sell for more than your 50% target.

E-Bay and Audiogon are different markets.

Learsfool, I think that you misinterpret what I said. There was no attempt to personally attack you at all, and my sincere appologies if it was taken that way. Calling into question your experience is not an attack at all, you are not less a person for it, but it is foundational to your blanket assertions. You have now decided to set up the straw man to support your ad hominem argument. As Willie the Shake once said, "Thou do protest too much."

Guys, the most bewildering thing to me is that you both keep asserting that I am making a blanket statement. Rereading my last post alone, I count at least four times where I said that there are many exceptions to what is a very general rule. I am truly sorry that you both apparently failed to see this. Which makes the straw man/ad hominem comment in particular especially amusing. Wow. All I can do now is laugh it off and move on, adding only that I sure am glad I decided to become a professional musician instead of a writer. No hard feelings here, I assure you, even for your misquotation. :)

Learsfool, you have subtly changed your position since initially writing on 8/25:

08-25-08: Learsfool
I would say, however, that one should never pay more than half of the original retail price for a used item, the only exception to this would be if it basically hadn't actually been used.

Good to see you are not quite as rigid in your position as you were a few days ago.