It’s the time of year for saving money!
Mid-January Audiogon, the leading site for buying and selling second-hand audio gear, went through a major site revamping. Almost instantly threads starting popping up other audiophile websites, like this one from AvGuide.com, or this from Audio Asylum trashing the changes. What began as discussions of a “lame” new website quickly degenerated into areas that made me uncomfortable. I think it would be more appropriate to look at the new website without getting into behind-the-scene musings.
I haven’t discovered any broken links or seen any obvious scam postings ala Craig’s List on Audiogon since the new site went live. But some Audiogon users have experienced problems. It did take a couple of days after the changeover until I could log in and have access to my user profile, but since then I’ve experienced no issues besides some pages being slower to load than on the old site.
I liked the old layout in that I could scan a page quickly and sub-pages opened lightning-fast. But the old site was not so good with visual support – photos were small and hard to see. The New Audiogon does have better picture support, with larger, more uniform photographs. The search functions work, especially for single word manufacturer keywords like “Accuphase,” but I’d like to see more categories in the category menu.
But the final question for me, that I still don’t know the answer to, is whether the new Audiogon will be more or less efficient for the end users than the older version. I guess we will just have to wait and see. Personally, I’m probably going to wait a month or so before I list or try to buy any gear, just to make sure that all the wrinkles are ironed out first.
