I dont have a store nearby, so i do most of my headphone exploring by buying and reselling used headphones. Havent made a profit nor a loss in 20 or so headphones. But in my country (Netherlands) the market is pretty bad, especially with the higher end stuff. People try to sell their (ab)used stuff often for more than new price and get annoyed when you offer them a more realistic price.
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Chicago FB and craigslist are 95% skullcandy, bose, jbl, soundcore, or gaming headsets.
I found a pair of K712’s for 90$ once, in rough shape, and the guy ghosted me.
I’d pretty much always rather create an open box discount for someone else by ordering headphones new online, trying them, and returning them.
Only just recently started entering the hobby and realised that where i stay is the Mecca of the iem world, Singapore. Audio shops like Zeppelin where you can demo almost high end iem and dap you dream of, to visiting Crinacle’s hangout where you can demo his own personal collection. It’s also the home to upcoming major brands like fatfreq, symphonium, nightjar acoustics, subtonic. Count myself very lucky
There’s a handful of hifi shops in Seattle, but they don’t tend to carry headphones/iems. The two that do, have a remarkably small selection that varies wildly. They all cater to people looking to spend waaay too much money on full home theater setups. So the prices are all remarkably high, even for used gear. If you want $6k and up speaker cables, they’ve got you covered. I had to travel to a headphone convention to test stuff out. I’ve bought some used stuff on ebay for a good price, but it was all from out of state. Same with stuff I’ve bought online. I’d love to be able to walk into a store and get decent headphones, but it’s just not an option here. There aren’t really any dedicated electronics stores in the area.
In PH the second hand market is great. They frown upon “flipping” or basically selling your item for more than what you got it for, basically kills buying and selling of such iems/hps. You get kicked out of audio groups if you get caught flipping. I do appreciate this actually since you want to be inclusive of people in the hobby
Part of the reason why I was able to get a vxv, noble k10, shure se846 for a combined price of 600usd
The next bigger stores here in my area are a few kilometers away but they are only selling stuff from JBL, Bose (bluetooth only), Sony (bluetooth only), Beats and a lot of noname stuff that the mainstream seems to prioritize. A few Sennheisers and AKG’s are there as well but that’s about it.
No Focal, no Denon, no Fostex, even no Audio Technica’s except one model that is really bright (the MSR7b), no Beyerdynamics (I had to drive a little longer to find a store where I was able to test them and I didn’t liked them), no Hifiman, no Audeze, no Meze… Nothing.
There are a few other smaller stores but they mainly only have speakers and amplifiers from Denon or Marantz for example.
I wish I could demo the Denon AH-D5200 because I’m interested in them. They could fit my tastes but I’ve read some contradictory things about their midrange. Some say it’s a bit distant and others say they are not. Some say it’s about the amp some say you don’t need one. This can be frustrating at some times.