What's up with the used gear market?

Saying all that I just got some real bargains by lowballing high prices with the sellers on eBay or reverb and taking chances. If you don’t care whether you win or not you have nothing to lose and as was mentioned before there is so much good boutique gear at reasonable prices that there’s nothing to stop great classic recordings.
The fetishisation of old classic gear is silly and by selling mine I bought a church and built a studio which is much better for recording than some old Neves and Urei’s in a crappy space. Let the rich hipsters pay 70k for a console worth 10 or 12k for a broken Fet compressor. I’m aiming for quality and I’m not concerned with fashion. My Bock 251’s were 2k each.
And likewise I sell at reasonable prices to move gear on.
I don’t sit on stuff to rinse the most I can. That is for greedy gits.

Really interesting, no I’m not, northern europe. It seems it took very different ways there and here as i read this thread. Here venues etc was shut down pretty fast, killed the grass root industry completely and with very irrational planning for the outcome of it all it really took a toll on the musicians fast among other of course too. That pretty fast forced people to sell gear. I suppose there was a short time where hobby musicians bought a lot of used gear here as the holiday trips etc was cancelled and people invested in summer cottages, motorcycles, boats and what not, so there was a period of time with excessive money floating around but the gear market was already pretty marginal as it was. And besides some guitars and other instruments the studio gear does not really have a huge market here as it is. So when mixers snd studios forced to rethink when artists couldn’t afford pushing out music quite a bit of gear was at hand at discount.

I would even go as far as saying this was just an outcome sealed by an already fast dying and dysfunctional music industry here at our end. Whereas in many places despite of lock downs musicians found ways of producing something, here it was pathetic. Since the industry is in very small hands there was really not much money to be made in alternative production methods for most musicians.

This at least how I experienced it. I was just in the zone of upgrading and streamlining my small studio so i was in for new gear and scanned the market here hard in those days.

We’ve got runaway inflation in NZ as well. A cucumber is $6. You can imagine what that means for pro audio gear.

Pickles are more labor intensive so probably even more expensive!

Being the idiot I am I make my own dog food, I just head to the produce place in the River Market buy a bunch of there clearance dog safe produce throw in some chicken boil drain pick out bones ( for a while I was getting free “waste “ from Andy Reid’s favorite restaurant Pigwich but my friend left their kitchen anyway on Monday clearance cucumbers 3 for a dollar.

I saw an ad for some tech company showing a guy in his garage selling pickles online, and business exploding. The guy all happy lol. Like.. ‘This could be you!!!’

I took a moment to price out a dream vintage chain on Reverb. U47 long body, 1073, 1176 blue stripe, pultec, LA2A.. it’s pushing $70,000-$80,000 per channel!

There is a sucker born every minute? The only one more fun is the guy selling an item as “ new” who is not a dealer and the manufacturer has a very strict “ no reseller” policy and no transferable warranty. So it ain’t new!

Mark -- please don't let facts get in the way of a good story

Just sold a mic that was basically brand new…no issues…and get the guy telling me the tube is shot. Said he ordered a replacement and wants me to pay for it. It was fine before it left me and I sold it for way cheaper than he could get anywhere else.

My sale was as-is, final. And I’ve got to be honest, I’m having a hard time with it. This is like the third time I’ve sold on reverb where someone has claimed some questionable bs. I have offered to split the difference on the cost of the tube - because it’s only like $25…but it’s getting ridiculous.

I’ve had dozens. But it’s been bad for the last year or two. I’m not sure how I would prove a tube is working to reverb…so I’ll just take the hit and learn my lesson. This is what I get for having enough integrity to not just have returned it to the place I bought it from.

That actually made me laugh