About 5 years ago I bought a JVC surround sound system for my (then) husband. When we divorced, he said I could have it (it was alaready hooked up and he didn’t want to go to the trouble of disconnecting the whole thing).
When I moved into my house about 3 years ago, I had no idea how to hook it up so it’s been in storage the entire time. I’m trying to clean out my storage shed, so I have two options: (1) find someone who knows how to hook this crap up to my existing cable box and DVD player, or, (2) try to sell it.
It’s not wireless and I have zero knowledge of how to even begin hooling it all up, much less in stringing up a bunch of wires all over my living room, so I think option 2 is the best option. My question (I had to get around to it eventually), how do I determine how much to ask for it? It was just over $300 new…fully functional, receiver with a subwoofer and 5 satellite speakers. I tried Googling but because it’s old, I couldn’t find anything.
Can someone assist or point me in the right direction?
As with most older electronic equipment, it is virtually worthless. Option #3 may be to just give it away and Option #4 would be to throw it away. You could try to sell it on Ebay but that would take some work on your part and I seriously doubt you could get more than $50 - $75 for it tops and you will have to advertise it, take pictures, repackage it, and ship it. Some people like to do things like that but I don’t.
***That isn’t to say that it has no value as actual equipment. I am sure that it works fine but that is just the way that most electronic equipment gets valued. If you can use it yourself somewhere or give it to a friend, there is probably a teenager around somewhere that would love to make $25 or so hooking it up in a new place.
What you might want to do is find a stock pic of a similar item, and list it free on Craigslist as a best offer or something along those line. Or list it once on eBay and see what kind of bids it draws.
You don’t have to sell it, on eBay, since most people don’t bid till the end you won’t get a price till after the auction ends. If you want to sell it fine, if not just tell the winner it broke and you can’t complete the auction.
One thing you can try is to Google around for the unit’s user manual. It’s probably in a pdf file somewhere, and will at least show you where to put the wires.
As Shagnasty says, it’s pretty much without value, so you might as well try and get some use out of it.
You could try an eBay search on it to see if anyone’s selling or buying it now (or use the completed listing feature to find recently completed auctions and their sale prices).
If it’s worth more than $50 or so and you don’t want to sell it yourself, you could try giving it to an “I sold it on eBay” store that’ll do it for you for a (somewhat hefty) commission. Or try Craigslist.
This is really bad form and possibly against the terms of use, not to mention just being asshole-ish behavior. It may also result in negative feedback against your account or worse. If you don’t want to sell an item unless it reaches a certain price, set a Reserve Price beforehand. If all you want is a rough price estimate, you can simply search other similar auctions. A listing on eBay is supposed to be a binding contract for both the seller and the buyer at whatever price the auction reaches at the end.
</rant>
Thanks for the info, all. I don’t eBay (not against it, just never have) so I’ll probably just ask around at work and see if some young airman would be interested in taking it off my hands…
I was at the electronic equipment recycling centre yesterday and what you say seems to be absolutely correct. It was quite depressing seeing piles of HUGE crt televisions and computer equipment lying around. I believe much or most of this stuff is shipped to China to be recycled but some of the stuff people were throwing away I was rather surprised at. The Age of Abundance has really taken hold in this country.