Some very good points. A colleague accurately described it as a "Nostalgia Wave". The same colleague who imported a 1970s Korg MS20 synthesizer from Japan (shortly before Korg decided it was so popular they would do a re-issue) and who sort out and bought the same type of Trio Amateur Radio transceiver he used back then at his University radio club. Luckily for me there is still a demand for vintage Model Trains as I have been selling my late Fathers collection for the last ten years. Here is one I sold which went for a very good price which the buyer then posted pictures of on his website, including the unwrapping. http://www.blue-gold-angel.com/index.php?page=detail&nr=918 Something that ebay has changed is that you now have a worldwide market. I have sold items almost all round the world Australia - Canada - USA - Russia. A very profitable sale was a boxed Tomy Zoid which I had bought in a surplus shop for £2.50 back in the early 1990s and some guy in Singapore paid £100 for. Something I have learnt from selling about 700 items, is that items that are sold as "collectables" are actually very poor investments. Remember those Models of Yesteryear model cars of things like Ford Model Ts that were produced by Matchbox in the 1970s. Having tried to sell them they usually aren't worth what they sold for in the 1970s (about £3 each). The thing is when they were new, kids thought they looked old fashioned and wanted cool cars like James Bond's Aston Martin. It also didn't help that most of them were bought by adults and locked away in display cabinets with the kids being told "if we keep it in perfect condition one day it will be worth a lot of money. Although I doubt it will happen (although it has with quite a few vintage synthesizers like the Korg MS20) it would be interesting as to what would happen if Sony decide to re-issue the TPS-L2. Would the prices of original units fall or would the mystique of them being originals keep them high? Of course if the re-issue was as expensive as the Technics SL1200 people would buy the old ones to save money. Although I have only been a member of Stereo2Go for a couple of years I have collected various things since my teens. Back then it was Valve / Tube radios. It is ironic seeing things that I remember coming out new now being treated as antiques - sometimes valuable - sometimes not. A final thought about an item I mentioned previously. I only discovered yesterday that Apple have completely discontinued the Ipod Nano and Shuffle. What will one of those NRFB (never removed from box) as Barbie collectors say be worth in twenty years time ?
i don't know if there'll be a giant ipod-hype because mp3's will disappear earlier or later, but you'll allways have the Apple-freaks, who hoard everything constructd under their "messias" steve jobs - but that crap must be "mint in box". a re-issue of the TPS-L2 won't save Sony's life, but even if drastically expensive, it would sell - and prices for (good) originals would stay high. watch brand TAG-HEUER (ex HEUER) re- released the 70'ies mega-watch AUTAVIA with the legendara Buren cal.12- movement (snadwich-made automatic chronometer with date and stopwatch, i think it was the first movement, featuring automatic and stopwatch, used not only by HEUER, also by other great manufacturers) with a very good, but sorta "boring" movement (a standard blabla movement as used in many, many new chrono's) the new ones were sold for gigantic prices - and the originals increased in price - same happened to the legendary (and most beautyful) sportscar Ford GT-40, now beeing re-released the 2nd time allready, still worth a fortune... what you're 100% right is, that all those "collector's edition" crap mostly isn't worth anything but waisting space, like "extremely limited silver-coins" etc., i think with that kinda crap you can only impress extremely underdelighted collectors...
I have a small interest in coins, but the only value you can bank on is the raw metal. There’s so much obfuscation and smoke and mirrors in metals like silver that you may as well just begin with the attitude that the premium you pay for a particular design or year is lost immediately in the same way a car devalues over time. Even though the mintage numbers are available for example on a 2012 Perth Mint silver 1oz Kookaburra, there’s no way to know who’s going to suddenly sell. The prices for walkmans are interesting because they seem ridiculous, but actually 6 hours work by a skilled repairman is easily worth the extra price. A skilled repairman needs to pay his/her bills too, just as all of our time is valued at our work places. If I get £10 an hour in London, and a normal day is 10 hours then I’m still only earning £500 a week which is very low for London compared to house prices and rent, assuming you want a pension and savings or children. That da Vinci painting went for £300million this week. It must have taken a few days to make, perhaps a week as Italians take their time with everything!
News reports said the same picture sold for £45 in the 1950s. That was about the same as a TV or Radiogram back then ! As with anything supply and demand.
Indeed supply and demand... But something is rotten in the state of Denmark: https://www.ebay.fr/itm/272935400039 (this was sold around 400 francs in France around 1990 IIRC, which is about 91 of today's euros).
I can barely read it but does it say $3,000 Euros for headphones and 28 bids? I'm happy with my little collection of Koss 4a's and Sony Sports, maybe I need to upgrade.
From what I can see, the seller cancelled the sale. It looks like someone’s put in a any-price bid and the other bidders have realised, and bid him up to wreck the sale.
Feel free to correct me in any way if i am wrong, this is merely my interpretation. The way I see it, the market is just going to keep on growing at an exponential rate until a start-up/company creates a new portable cassette player that seems better then older models from the 80's/90's that has a retro feel to it which teenagers like myself will probably buy thinking it looks old and as such it's cool, in essence the marketing folks are doing their job well. Also they probably want to display how special and unique they are, say how about that cassette player that everyone recognizes from that marvel movie... Think of hipsters buying Crosley cruisers; many of them buy them because either they are ignorant or to uncaring to research of other pre-existing models on ebay, or they feel safer with buying a new produced model that is covered by warranty, and I think many of them think that NEW equates to BETTER. If they are too uncaring to research on other audio formats other then what's popular they will wait to be spoon-fed what is good and what is bad, what is hip and what isn't. As an example we can see a correlation of the release of TECHMOAN videos and PRICE SPIKES on Cassette players he reviews, a snowball effect if you will. The cassette bubble will keep on growing until the market is over-saturated and the bubble bursts. Perhaps people will move on to ElCaset or R2R due to thinking it is more analogue and therefore higher quality. We can see that a lot of the vinyl community are approaching cassettes due to the premise of portable analog recordings.The paradox they face is that if they digitalize their record to digital, it stops being analog but rather a harsh digital file that loses alot of it's quality due to their phone's basic DAC that wasn't meant for use as a dedicated music player but as the amalgamation that is the smart phone. I am biased and I think it shows. As stated before, feel free to correct me in any way if i am wrong, this is merely my interpretation.
You've got most of it Command8 but I don't think it's really growing exponentially, I never see anyone else into tapes around here. One of the factors for the price rising is that money has lost a lot of value in the last twenty years, so while guys were finding 50 dollar Walkmans 20 years ago, that's almost like a 100 dollar Walkman today. I asked my used record store what the best selling vintage vinyl is and they said, Journey, Foreigner, etc, the groups that get played to death on the radio. I have to believe people are finding the same on cassette tape (these tapes are abundant) for next to nothing, then you grab a little Walkman, which is also super cool and an attention grabber, and your in. I doubt the other formats will come into play due to the lack of a small personal player, rarity, and no-prerecorded media and more for the geek crowd. I doubt anybody would be able to make a cassette player that is good enough, there's still a bunch of NOS really cheap players that most people avoid and the good players from yesteryear would be thousands of dollars retail now, if anybody could I'd think Marantz/Superscope would be a good bet or Sony. I feel like the vinyl community and the portable cassette guys are two different crowds, the vinyl guys love relaxing and hearing and touching their favorite music and for the most part, over 50, while the nu-cassette guys are the true hipsters, riding the newest trend and much younger. The crowds may cross, I dabble in both, but for the most part they stay apart, even the boombox guys and the personal cassette player guys tend to stay separated.
I resurrected my walkmans for exactly for this reason as few years back; vinyl rips are soo boring and time consuming. It is so convenient to record a record straight to cassette and then get it straight into the walkman and you are out of the door with a great sounding, musically engaging version of your latest fav album
heehee, i never ever before heard of Crosley Cruisers and checked only NOW, this is the whorst crap you can waist your money on - only topped by mp3' played while walking, but using the integrated speaker of your mobile-phone
Like it or loathe it I suspect the Crosley Cruiser is the most talked about turntable this century. It might also have done more for the Vinyl revival than any other new deck / player. This week VWestlife posted an excellent video in which he does what seems like a quite impartial review. It is also interesting to read the comments on this and other videos about the Crosley. They seem to be split between people who recognise it for what it is - a fun low cost novelty to start out with, and those who think no one should be allowed to play vinyl on anything less than a Linn or Rega.
Agreed, they did a job of cashing out on this new fad, maybe even did something good in the process, I dunno. Speakers built into TT, what an abomination! Listening to these you won't upgrade, once the "cool factor" is over you go back to iPhone and upgrade to Astell & Kern player What I cannot understand is why Rega (or Pro-Ject, Clearaudio, Audio Technica) failed to join the under-$100 game. The cheapest one I recommend is AT-LP60 but why is it so impossible to take that platter/tonearm and put them onto a piece of MDF (Rega-style)... without any auto-whatever, bluetooth, USB... For under $100, with $5 phono-pre as an option. Call it Rega P-0.1 As it is, my young and broke friends go for some used TTs and then bitch about re-belting and cleaning or not being able to fix them. Anyone knows of any TT (not a plastic garbage) cheaper than this: Essential III ?? Even House of Marley has better arm than AT-LP60.
A large majority of the used records that the kids are buying are in pretty rough shape so a low-end turntable is really all they need. Hopefully they'll enjoy the pursuit of vinyl and upgrade and personally I think it's a foot in the door that may lead to better things. I keep having this ION pop up on my ads, it looks pretty cool runs on batteries or USB but someone should have told them the oval buttons and the Garrard Style Tone Arm make it look cheap. It's only $79 USD, I'm really tempted to try it and maybe modify it. It also looks like they have a Sound Burger Version 2 coming out soon.
That is a monster! I was just in Argos and saw this: After all the Bush discussion they seem to be selling a entire range of turntables... http://www.argos.co.uk/product/7457900
Speedy, I always thought it would be cool to have one of the 50's art deco turntables and play some Denny Martin or exotica on it, the closest I got was an old Zenith Tube Unit with radio.
