Items for sale here and on ebay without remotes....
Do people understand that many of these items may be stolen? No time to find the remote in the theft. By no means all, but especially on ebay the number of units without remotes is amazingly high.
Stolen stuff gets fenced or pawned quickly. For cash. No grab and run thief is going to take the time to open an E-bay account, tied to a credit card through Paypal, pay to ship an item and wait for payment... seriously...
I, on the other hand, am always very suspicious of people selling remotes without the associated equipment. Talk about your petty theft. But seriously, sometimes remotes just crap out. I've had a couple of remotes that had a button or two stop functioning. If equipment is older, you can't buy a replacement, and the remote is for convenience & not essential; I just toss it out. The garage sale catagory is very valid if you also include Estate Sales. The audiophile demographic is skewing older and older, and when the owners passes on the rest of the family (or the Estate Sale Shop) has no idea "What does this remote go with". I've also had bad battery experience at least once, so maybe I'll just replace all my batteries in the next few weeks. Thanks Al.
Clean up day? Heck yes! A guy at work some years ago gave me a huge Klein & Hummel amp and preamp that he had picked up at his neighbors on one of those pick up days. He knew I was an audio guy so he just grabbed them and said here you go. The amp was massive, big meters and everything. The preamp didn't work correctly. The amp sure did. He was a Science Fiction type so I gave him a big stack of Scifi that I had already read. Everybody was happy.
Yeah, I admit that I bought a Yamaha receiver at a garage sale directly across the street from me for $8. No remote of course. I was able to buy one on line at a decent price so the total cost was about $25. I’m not a surround guy but I still use that receiver with one of my t.v.’s. I’m still diligent with my remotes though. I just wish I could be the same about my phone.
Its a well known phenomenon that remotes disappear into the same black hole that swallows up all the pens, cos you can never find one of them when you need one either.
On a more serious note Georges clean up day happens any and every day here in the USA. Its pretty much accepted knowledge that anything that is put out at the end of a persons drive is fair game for anybody to rummage through.
I have put my fair share of items out and always constantly amazed at what people take!
Never yet found any decent audio but you just never know!
In Australia, every 6 months we have "clean up day", where you put all your junk out that you don’t want and it’s collected by council to be recycled. A friend once scored a pair of early Thiel's and a Threshold amp. Many are audio products, TV’s, white goods, moblies ect that are faulty, and some worth grabbing if "upper end stuff" as it could be fixable, but rarely does one get the remote with it, sometimes these are fixed by the budding electronic tech and then advertised usually without the remote.
I'm no tin foil hat wearer but last I checked remotes don't have feet. They shouldn't just wander off on their own. It's amazing to me that people can't seem to hold on to them.
I don't know what kind of area you guys live in but to me the whole idea that a significant percentage of items sans remotes are stolen is bizarre. I've picked up a large number of receivers for instance at garage sales. Very few have remotes. Are they therefore suspicious? Get real.
Before you sneer that I mentioned garage sales, I did find a nice set of Quad ESL 57's on custom hardwood Levinson stands for $300 once in the Haight by the Panhandle. Yes, I did. No, I didn't think that somebody had broken a window, grabbed the speakers and gone a running to then sell them at a garage sale. Ever been to a thrift shop and seen a bin full of lonely remotes? No?Seems like all Thrift stores have a bin like that. Because of all the thugsthat are too lazy to hunt down the remotes? I just don't see it.
I’ve been lurking on this forum for about six months and this is my first post.
I have to agree with the OP. Not so much on Audiogon but as far as Ebay is concerned I believe that a good percentage of items with missing remotes are stolen. Note: I did say "a good percentage". That doesn’t mean ALL.
Most thieves "smash and grab". They’re not wasting time looking for the matching remote. I’ve been burglarized several times in my lifetime. Three home break-ins and three automotive thefts. I know, I wasn’t living in the best neighborhoods at the time but nowadays that’s irrelevant. Thieves aren’t picky who they steal from.
I also agree with the posters who have left batteries in too long and they leaked. I either had to replace or repair a few due to that.
But, in all my years I’ve never "lost" a remote. I always keep the original box, manual and remote. I don’t carry the remote around the house with me. All my remotes are on a small table next to my listening position.
Yeah, some folks may have lost their remotes during a move or they have children who may wander off with one but if you really care about your gear you would treat the remote the same as the main piece.
If I swap a piece of gear out and it’s not going to be used for awhile, I remove the batteries (so I don’t have any more leakage incidents) from the remote and put the remote with that piece of gear so it doesn’t disappear.
Just my opinion, but when I was looking for a relatively inexpensive Universal DVD player on Ebay I noticed the same thing the OP did. NO REMOTE. After awhile, I couldn’t help but think, "C’mon, ALL these people couldn’t all have lost or trashed their remotes."
Remember, for a lot of today’s gear the remote plays an integral part in the operation. DON’T LOSE IT!
My phone on the hand ... that’s another story all together. :-)
@almarg "One reason a seller may not have the remote, at least in the case of an
older piece, is that at some point in the past he or she may have left
its batteries in too long and they leaked. Which might have created such
a mess on the terminals and elsewhere inside that it was thrown out."
That's truly an excellent point, Al. How many of us haven't been there?
Yeah a junky robs high priced audio equipment and then ,sells it on here.LOL at the prices so things are sold for here i doubt it .You have guys selling old cds for 10-20 dollars,and 5 bucks for shipping .Now thats a crime.......
Or be like me. See an item on local Craigslist. Go look at it, like it buy it. Get home, found you left the freaking remote there. Decide you will go back for it some day..........
One reason a seller may not have the remote, at least in the case of an older piece, is that at some point in the past he or she may have left its batteries in too long and they leaked. Which might have created such a mess on the terminals and elsewhere inside that it was thrown out.
I have a Dynaco tube output CD player. I like it, and it sounds quite good. For whatever reason, I lost the remote after two years, and it HAS to be somewhere around my listening room, but I have never been able to find it. I have another CDP whose remote works it, but it still upsets me. All the other remotes I have, including for VCRs. Just wish I could find that remote.
By the way, two close high school buddies are sergeant and detective in two of the local police forces. They usually gives me the current lay of the land whenever we get together. Lots of opioid addiction, which I find beyond tragic. So many of these people take part in this sort of B & E crime in and around the Philadelphia area. What they want, ranked in order are 1) cash 2) jewelry, and 3) iPhones, iPads, and laptops. IOW, items they can quickly sell for almost nothing to finance the next week or two of highs. The kitchen and master bedroom is what gets hit hardest, and what most people find most hurtful is the jewelry for obvious sentimental reasons. Given it’s difficult to hack an iphone / iPad because of iCloud, I don’t know what they see in taking that stuff. Supposed street value is $25, tops. They don’t go for big screen tvs or stereo equipment, as it’s in the grand scheme of their existence, that stuff proves difficult to move. For example, how would they ever carry out a pair of Vandersteen 2s or a Rowland amp? After that, who would they sell it to? You don't see such items come up from that sort of seller on Audiogon. That’s no guarantee, of course...
Good points all around. Many sellers presume that a remote is easy to find/replace? Careless on the owners behalf unless the item is described as a thrift or donation.Happy Listening!
Maybe a little off topic, but some gear (Cd players?) will lose a lot of their features without the remote. Many players have very stark front panels with only a few buttons on them.
I bought 6 used McIntosh pieces in the last 9 months and even though they came with the remotes, I ordered all new ones. I get skived by using used remotes. I have seen people scratching their junk with the remote plus worse, why would I want to touch it?
I had a burglary in 1987. The burglars must have been in a hurry and didn't bother to take the time to take apart an entire rack of McIntosh separate components. They did steal the remote control for my McIntosh MCD 7000 compact disk player. I bought a new remote from Mac for $100. Burglars also stole my McIntosh XR-16 loudspeakers (which I never did like). With the insurance money I bought a new pair of Apogee Duetta II loudspeakers, which still sound glorious to this day.
Seems to me, if the thief can't find the remote, it was probably already lost.
Folks are stealing my remote around here all the time. Daily!
But seriously, thinking like a thief, if I am stealing, components hooked up, it's likely easy to find the remote pile, and I'm taking that too. OR, I think what happens a lot, the component is in a box or packaged ready, in which case, the remote is there with it.
And come to think of it, I bet in actual reality, people maybe steal more remotes than equipment.
So...no...I don't think missing remote is any indication of a component being stolen.
I can easily see how someone would use a programmable remote and misplace the original remotes. Mine adjust lighting and such so in some applications they are a nice touch
That is interesting. I worked in the Audio industry and my friends are mostly audiophiles. I worked at a high end audio store (audio research,. etc.) and never ordered a replacement remote for a customer. Would be good to hear from a manufacture on the frequency of orders for replacement remotes. I do agree that a person can lose or break their remote. And i did say "may be". As with most things regarding used units, it is good to know the background. The words "may be" is in no way assuming the pieces are stolen, simply another part of "Buyer beware". What makes you think that "many people lose or break their remotes"?
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