This X9: http://tinyurl.com/9gt946c sold for almost $3000! This is a somewhat rough example: cosmetically, there are some deep scratches on it from rackmounting, and no remote included. There are tons of much nicer examples available on the Japanese market: for example Hifido (ships worldwide and well known for packing well) sold this X9 http://www.hifido.co.jp/KWhld-x9/G1/E/0 ... -51887-00/ in june for 138000 yen, and it included the original paperwork and remote. Here is a comparable example from Yahoo JP (no manual/remote) that only went for 61000 yen (a mere 769 dollars!): http://y.aucfan.com/aucview/yahoo/w78448162/ If I was going to spend $3k on an X9, I would probably just get the one that Nicholas Santini has for that price, and pay the extra in shipping to get a nicer X9 from Japan. Even with high shipping, importing from Japan makes sense if you are after an X9.

christmas time , also it's in america, lots of people don't want to deal out of the country.
they think it will get lost or damaged in shipping.

hm, 3000 seems crazy even though its in america imo. I bought my x9 for about 97.000 YEN at yahoo auctions.jp, it had a totally new pickup and came with mint controller and paperwork. think in total i paid about 1400$, and thats with shipping from japan to norway with EMS. there is a X0 on yahoo right now for 142.000 YEN

Yes I'd agree $3000 is about double the normal going rate for a nice clean HLD-X9 player.
If you factor in condition which was quite poor it was probably only worth $1000 tops and that is being conservative.
I guess some people don't care about cosmetic appearance. I wouldn't buy a high end player if it was in poor condition unless it was for spares and even then I'd prefer one without knocks!