Why isn't better quality used gear being made available?

If they in good shape it sounds like a good deal.

I would offer them $400 to rent them for two days with the balance owed if you keep them. Or just buy them outright. And if you do this I would see if you can look inside them to see if there's anything that looks out of place. Check on the history if you can figure that out. 

Interesting comments.  I guess if you're spending 30 or 40,000 on an amplifier they're probably aren't too many of them and when they do happen to appear in an ad they are discounted nicely sometimes. Instant gratification to buy something like this is not really possible. I've been lucky with my dealer he manages to get new things very quickly for me.
 

I’m beginning to think a lot of stuff being sold on the higher end is sold off as part of estate sales. Along with all the antiques and furniture other stuff to empty the house of things nobody in the family wants I guess. Maybe the estate Area is the place to find choice items.

@roxy54

You funny man.

@x5owner1 

Thank you for your comment but just because someone says it sounds good somehow that's supposed to influence me to buy it. that's the oldest marketing trick in the world

I'm not sure how you can choose new speakers unless you can hear them or you trust a dealer because maybe his opinion matters.  It's very very very very difficult to buy speakers. I used to spend  more money get better speakers but that's not true.  

When it comes to buying speakers I think people tend to feel comfort about what they're buying when it cost more. If I put a $7000 speaker in front of you and a $20,000 speaker in front of you you'll probably say the $20,000 speaker sounds better even if you haven't heard it.

Speaker manufacturers have product lines and in their descriptions it makes it sound like there might be something more to a more expensive speaker but they never really explained why it cost more money. More expensive drivers a more expensive cabinet more expensive crossovers… OK this is nice but it's not really that much more since materials cost are such a small portion of the overall price. It's simply that people feel more comfortable spending more money.

It's a marketing strategy that's all. Are you secure enough to purchase what may be a better speaker for substantially less? Same thing applies to amplifiers and pre-amplifiers. Hopefully the more money you spend the better the product is but is this really the case and if it is why don't they tell you why it's more expensive? They show a $200,000 speaker at a show which very very few people were buy obviously and somehow this makes it easier and more justifiable for you spend $50,000 on a speaker from their product line. It's a marketing strategy that's all and I'm not sure how good it's working.

To clarify, it's very very very difficult to decide which speakers to buy and then to decide which speaker within a manufacturers product line to buy.

As far as spending more money, you don't need to spend a lot of money to get great sound from a speaker. There are plenty of speakers in the $10,000 range that are just as good as a $35,000 speaker. That's one of the challenges that makes buying speakers so difficult.  There are so so many overpriced speakers and trying to avoid them is very very very difficult.

I hope that clarifies things

OK maybe you’re right, I’ll change my answer to $25,000.

And then it follows that there are so many $25,000 speakers that easily match a $50,000 speaker, which are mostly overpriced because they have a huge margin and are being bought by people who really don’t care about how much money they’re spending on a speaker.

But  clearly it's very challenging to avoid over paying when you're willing to pay more for more expensive speakers

Ever wonder what happens to all the used gear being returned to dealers. They take trade-ins all the time and yet never seem to have anything available for sale used.  It's a quandary.

Maybe the manufacturers agree to take it back in some crazy financial maneuver to get it off the market. Clearly they much prefer to sell a brand new item and if the channel is clogged with used stuff the manufacturers suffer.

So dealers take my trade-in and sell it to a company specializing in the sale of used gear? So that may explain things.

How does anyone make money selling new equipment with all this complexity? Unless the margins are greater than 50%.

It seems with all the solid state gear we're saturating a limited market with used gear since this stuff lasts for Long time. Eventually the market wouldn't be able to handle new gear as easily. And we know that new products introductions are mostly the same as old products only in new packaging. 

A lot of life-changing events have happened since I started this epic thread so long ago. Adopted a dog and have become a philatelist.

Being a philatelist is a very very expensive hobby too. So much to learn. They got this one tiny square piece of paper called a stamp with perforations all around it with an upside down airplane in the middle. It’s an air mail stamp called the Jenny, the inverted Jenny. It’s very rare because it was a printing error and looks really cool and there aren’t too many of them. One recently sold for $2 million. How many $2 million speakers do you know of?

I also learned that you only get your image on a stamp if you’re dead.
In 50 years we may see Oprah gracing mail as it travels across the country.

I haven’t decided what my specialty will be yet. I like older US issues from the 1800s. They don’t make them like they used to. Also like historical covers and cancellations of the older variety can be very collectible. They used to cancel things by hand early on.

Curiously it’s very similar to audio gear. While mint or new stamps are more valuable used stamps can be very desirable and extremely valuable. And they have all kinds of condition issues that need to be evaluated.

I bought a used preamp from a dealer in England on eBay for about $20,000 via credit card. there was a misrepresentation issue and before it was shipped I tried to cancel.  It would've been nice to have that preamp. 

Ebay was extremely helpful and they saw in the messaging there was a problem. Fortunately I was able to get the transaction voided and seller refunded amount and I made money on the exchange.

@ghdprentice

It was a VTL used preamp 7.5 iii and it was in the color I was looking for. This was at a time new amplifiers were, and still are, hard to find and I really wanted it. Don’t see too many of these things coming up used for sale

I Settled for something else but it would’ve been better to have the VTL. Another factor was vtl doesn’t like to service or even look at preamplifiers from foreign countries