Home Shady Lane

Retailers, Manufacturers, ePay, AudiogoN, Paypal or whatever. Buying and selling advice.

It depends...

I've always tried to follow Walt Bender's rule: if the buyer isn't satisfied, the deal gets undone. I know that puts sellers at a disadvantage to the very few idiots out there who just want to try something, and the many idiots out there who are just idiots. I also know that shipping can cause strange problems; I asked Kyle at Reference Audio Mods about working on my Marantz 8260, and he cautioned that they have seen units fail after shipping, from hairline cracks in the boards, even though the outer packaging was undamaged. And there *are* idiots out there who just don't know what they're doing. I once sold a CAL CD transport and DAC via local pickup. The buyer played them in my home, bought them, then called from his home across town to say it didn't work. Sure 'nuff, it was now junk. I have no idea what he did to it, but I gave him his money back and threw it in the trash. Sometimes it's best to just move on.

For low-end, non-fancy stuff, I'll sell on ebay with "guranteed not DOA; otherwise no returns." For the good stuff I describe it as accurately as I can, and hope I don't run into a problem-buyer more than once every few years or so.

Your buyer sounds like a problem. No one should be hooking up cables, balanced or otherwise, on unknown gear with the power on; if the power is off, he can't be getting a squeal. (And I wonder if that squeal could be coming from his other gear with pin 3 hot connecting to your DAC with pin 2 hot, or home-made cables with pin connections screwed up or something like that...) If it was me, I'd take it back, take my lumps, and move on.
WW



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  • It depends... - Bill Way 11:21:23 01/25/11 (0)

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