What's happened to the used high end market recently?? Sales are tough....:0(

Since he's joined the site recently, Michael Green brought tremendous insight and refreshing perspective. Obviously, no one served on the front lines more than Michael, and so many of us took cues from him over the years to improve our systems. He often makes the point here of the high-end audio business taking a turn in the mid-late 90s, and falling into decline since.

I perceived that same shift myself at the time. And since...

The manifestation of that fall is something that always struck me as being off-kilter, but sounds logical to so many that my trying to refute it over the years normally fails to resonate with folks. It goes like this...a dealer or manufacturer states it takes just as much effort to sell a $100 item as a $1000 item. So, in the vein of working smarter, not harder, I focus on customers interested in the $1000 item, as opposed to the $100 item, as I'm working 10X less. Seems reasonable and smart, yes?

We normally bypass the disproportion of that, in that the $1000 pie is far smaller than 10X than the $100 pie. Anyway, that's the way the market, and we now need to multiply these $100 / $1000 numbers by an order or two of magnitude to represent the current state we all lament for the sadness and smallness of the market / business / hobby. Combine this path of pricing with the backfill of lower cost HEA components with tweaks that strike most outside the hobby and many inside as sounding both ridiculous and impossible, and should any of us feel surprised how this morphed into a lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe?

I'll contrast what high-end audio has become with an article I read in the late 90s about a guy who blasted on the scene, creating a fortune running a bank modeled after McDonald's and The Home Depot, instead of the normal bank and Post Office. It was all about low cost and convenience to the customer. The bank stayed open in the evening and on the weekends, including Sunday. Regardless of what you think of McDonald's food and service, or this banker as a person, his analysis into the success behind McDonald's struck me as brilliant. Again, he made an absolute fortune, though impropriety caused the powers that be find a suitable bank to take over, aka TD Bank. I think we can find a similar pattern and important lessons to learn in not a lot of $20K tube amplifiers getting sold, but certain companies dealing out more fuses at $100 a pop than we could have believed a few years ago

@akaim8 you really make an excellent case.

I'll extend your position by mentioning Amazon Alexa.  My sister's family and my best friend's fall into my demographic, mid-late 40s.  Neither has an audio rig, though my buddy put together an Onkyo based system in the early 90s that one could argue represented HEA at the time, albeit at the lower end.  Both families really love music, so it's not for lack of interest.  Both now have Alexa in their home, with speakers across several rooms.  Whenever I'm at their homes, most of the time music is playing, preceded by, "Alexa, play me Steve Earle's best songs."  I can't tell you how many other people I hear talking about using Alexa in the same way

@jmcgrogan2 thank you for your comments, John.  Hope all is well back in the Philly area...

You bring up excellent points on the internet and the state of society.  Obviously, the web turned most retail businesses on their ear.  My previous point was the rising price trajectory of one to two orders of magnitude crippled what we used to considered the audiophile world, and shrank it more than proportionally. Though the internet rose at the same time, I don't blame that on HEA's decline, as it could (should?) have actually grown the hobby. Personally, I'm surprised this many brands have survived until today.

Of course, you may disagree with how I see things...

I saw the internet change high-end audio in several ways.  The information explosion provided sources far beyond the two magazines.  The many internet publications, forums like Audiogon, and email allow us to discover and discuss brands, setup, experience, etc. we often had little to no previous knowledge of.  We transcended the days of relying on the advice of friends and local dealers, with this newfound access to these brands and their personnel yielding almost instant satisfaction compared with the days of sitting down to write and send off an actual letter or the once expensive long-distance telephone call.  Going the other way, it allowed the mom and pop or one man band audio companies to compete on a more level than ever playing field with the bigger names in the industry by providing low to no cost advertising and the ability to interact with a nationwide and even worldwide customer base, and to even bypass the need to build a dealer network via direct sales and eCommerce.  Except for a very few companies that guarded geographic integrity, buyers now interacted with a far greater dealer circle and used component wells.  All of this increased price competition on components to something that just didn't exist. 

Still, component pricing took off on a level that we could not have imagined 20 years ago.  Back then, most considered a $4K speaker the investment of a more than dedicated audiophile.  Somewhere around 5 years ago, I almost fell off my chair when I read a post here lamenting the flaws of a product, "you just can't get that good a speaker for $35K."  Things have only gotten more expensive since.  Call me out of touch with current reality, but I still believe one can buy an awfully good loudspeaker for $4K, though that now often has to come from the used market.

Anyway, in the past decade, I've turned the other way.  Having access to now afford the kind of things in life we used to dream of as younger men, I find less fulfillment, and even disappointment in the bigger, more expensive, garish item, audio and otherwise.  It's a rare component, loudspeaker, cable built to impress that actually satisfies me.  I feel happier and hear more music and soul in the simple typical 10 - 50 watt tube amplifiers than those with more than 100 watts, or additional and complex circuitries designed to take care of myriad supposed issues.  I could say the same for loudspeakers, etc., but the point has been made

@jimman2 what NJ town is your record shop located?

@jimman2 Mullica Hill is a nice town. Not sure if you know Big Daddy Graham, but back a decade or more when I used to listen, he often talked about vinyl. Might be a customer of yours.

I sometimes pass through on the way to the shore. Though I’m now in Vancouver, if I get back this summer, don’t be surprised to see me

@grannyring phenomenal post!