just got back from London, my boss has an apartment there, and in his lounge were a new pair of Beolab 5's

http://theaudiocritic.com/blog/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=6&blogId=1

Peter Aczel was right on the money when he did his review a few years ago, they sound great turned up really loud :-)

So was Paul Messenger   http://www.ultraaudio.com/equipment/bang_olufsen_beolab_5.htm

Now I need to really think about putting my Beolab 6000's in the bedroom and getting a pair of these for the living room !

Do they ever come up on ebay ?  I will never be able to afford them new in my lifetime - unless I win the lottery of course  

i have never encountered a pair of bl5 on ebay, and if i remember well, haven't seen any second life bl5 at all. must be because all of the owners are very happy with them...

i only remember one guy (but not his name) on the old forum who had to sell his bl5 because his neighbours where complaining all the time of to loud music. if i knew who he was, you could send him a pm. sure someone remembers.

9 LEE:

Yes, they are truly awesome speakers!  I cannot help grinning whenever i hear them..

For a 'new' pair, ex demo, you will probably wrestle a pair off an official dealer for about £8000 if he wants rid of them!

Lee

There's always that bass driver that keeps popping up on eBay
or wait til Lee starts giving them as prizes to gold members

Andy T.

Calvin:

But then it begs the question of why would a dealer want to get rid of them? Unless there's something uber-secret in the pipeline...

But Alex, if there's no market established for "cheap" pre-owned BL5s, it means there are no/very few sellers. How can the speakers be rapidly losing its value, then? Unless, as Calvin points out, the dealers know something we don't. Highly unlikely...

On the contrary, the more a dealer would rotate the displayed speakers, the more he would create such a "cheap" market around him eroding his own potential profit margins on the items not sold at the new-item price. 

For a B&O dealer it should not be a matter of death or life to accept the cost/depreciation of the displayed/demo speakers. After all, if new B&O would lose it's price rapidly when being sold further, then there clearly would be something wrong with the product/pricing etc. Now, it's not that such "aggressive" market approach would not work for some time, but it would indicate that B&O business would be similar to, say, car business which generally depends on volumes sold heavily . (Tellingly, Porsche in it's niche is the most profitable car manufacturer...)