I bought my maxed XL w/8 outputs & effects in pretty minty condition off Craigslist a good 5-6 years ago for $350 and any I've seen on there since, XL or non, have been asking twice that for half the quality (there's 2 on there now for $700). All I had to do was upgrade to a CF reader. But asking price and selling price are 2 different things.
There's several other vintage samplers going around locally for about $200 that I've been tempted to pick up because no one is grabbing them (except for the s950 of course, price on that listing is holding high & steady lol), but the fact that people aren't jumping on them makes me question how I'm going to offload some of my own gear; I feel like the second-hand hardware market has hit a lull in the last 2-3 years and will stay there for awhile, as it seems a lot of companies these days are revitalizing the hardware market and pumping out a lot of hands-on tech & products. The analog & modular markets have been BLOWING UP. I can think of 3-4 samplers off the top of my head that render both the XL AND computer obsolete that have been released in the last few years. The only thing the XL has now is "clout" or whatever the kids are calling it. It's been grandfathered in as a legacy piece of gear, much like an 808 or whatever.
TLDR Older samplers were in competition with computers in an era where those computers still rivaled samplers in power, yet people would still miss the hands-on experience of a sampler...so they would eschew the computer in favor of interaction. Now, we have hardware samplers that rival even computers in what they can do, so our older gear is in competition with those samplers, which can offer more than what a computer can do while retaining the hands-on experience of a hardware.
MPC 1000 w/jjOS, Elektron Octratrack, Korg EX-8000 & MS-20 Mini, Behringer Neutron, E-mu E6400 Ultra, circuit bent Roland TR 505, Mackie 1604 VLZ3, Electrix Filter Factory, delays & compressors
That was a GOOD price. Out of curiosity - when did you buy it? Was it maxed out?