Ah...sooo,
Anyway, TZD raised the price because these are totally pimped-out units.
History:
*TZD sells Turbo Express units, they're like, pretty expensive.
*Years pass, TE units at TZD get a little cheaper, like $179+/-
*New and used TE units are increasingly found to have bad audio as the capacitors slowly die.
*Meanwhile, in the "real world" (ebay) the price of TE units continues to skyrocket. In '05-06 unscrupulous sellers slowly discover TZD and start buying units and reselling them on ebay in the $300 range.
*TZD responds by instituting a 1 TE per customer policy.
*TZD issues several warnings that they only have a few units left.
*Turbo Express units are removed from the TZD catalog.
*TZD sends their remaining handful of bad-sound but still brand-new units to some unknown source (D-Lite? Santa's elves? NEC? Retrogames?) and all of the capacitors are magically replaced for "screaming sound and video"
*TE units are restocked for $249. (They really, probably don't have many left at this point.)