Have you a music instrument that has GAINED in value over the years?

The Lounge General Discussion
#61

I think I paid just over $300 for my Roland Alpha Juno in the very late '90s, and now it looks to go for $450-550 USD, which isn’t a huge jump.

I found a Rockman Distortion Generator in a thrift store for $30. It just turned out to be a pretty standard overdrive and honestly I never used it, but it’s gone up in value quite a bit the last number of years. Just sold it in February for $300.

I also picked up an ESQ1 from a repair shop for pocket change, maybe even free, also late '90s and sold that for $300-400 or so, but kind of instantly regret doing so.

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#62

Painful. I have a friend that had one and let it go way too cheap years ago. He kicks himself but doesn’t miss its 200lb heft. That said, the same guy bought a very clean TR-909 for $75 so there is that.

#63

Mostly inflation:

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#64

Got a brand new Monomachine for $850 Canadian ($635 US)when it was discontinued and put on clearance. I still have it, but I imagine I could I sell it for more than that now.

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#65

The Sidstation hasn’t done bad for itself. It’s more than double in value since I’ve bought it.

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#66

You would have to kill me to get my MD mk2. I guess that is expensive :smiley:
on the other hand, you can have my mc-303 for free (well, maybe buy me a pint of beer or two)
I think my dx200 might be worth more than I payed for it, but I honestly cant remember what I payed for it.

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#67

My brother found a 1960s Watkins Westminster Tremolo guitar amp abandoned at the side of the road alongside a really shoddy guitar with nasty microphone pickups sometime in the 1980s. I ended up with it - and the guitar - knocking around as a noisemaking devices for many years, as the valves in the amp were highly crackly and prone to overheating, the connections were dubious and it fed back like crazy. I loved it.

I asked a friend who repairs amps to have a look at it, which he duly did, made it work nicely and brought it back for me to try out; it sounded great, never better, with a rich warm tone and no crackles. I immediately gave it to said friend since he’s in a raw and raucous blues band and would actually use it much more than I would, which he set out to do. It sounds great these days, looks immaculate now that the furniture has been cleaned up, has gone to the right home, and I’m glad I got to pass on a piece of musical equipment to a real aficionado.

I just checked and those amps go for upwards of £400 at auction, which is nice; but as @darenager mentioned above, for me these are instruments to be played and enjoyed, not investments.

I still have the guitar somewhere, sans strings and sounding horrid, I’m sure.

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#68

I still dream of finding a 808 or 303 at a car boot sale for like 10 bucks. there must be some out there owned by people that don’t have a clue.

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#69

I saw a CZ-101 and a CZ-5000 at a yard sale last year. I told the guy that they were way more valuable than what he was asking. He wanted like $40 for the CZ-5000. He sold them on Reverb and thanked me. :rofl:

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#70

Good on you. It can be hard to do that in those instances. I found my cz5000 at the local garbage dump along with several other synths. Underrated synth. Nice spacey pad machine.

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#71

I’ve got a couple.

My V-Synth with both of the expansion cards is slowly increasing in value. The vocoder card is very hard to find these days.

The best is a white mf104m delay I got for about £300 a while back. They’re going for daft money now.

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#72

I came so close to buying a V-Synth and I really wish I had.

#73

Damn, that reminds me of one of my favorite synths I had. Got a CZ-101 for 20 bucks. This was like 15 years ago. Sold it for 20 bucks (that guy was happy), because I wasn’t using it much at the time. Now I listen to samples I made on that thing, and I still use them. Would love a 101 again. But they are much more that 20 bucks. I think much more like 400.

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#74

I have a lot of those stories, but maybe the craziest was in the late 90’s, when I saw an ad in the Pennysaver in the garage sale section for “guitar synth $175” and when I checked it out it was a strange analog 3osc rackmount monosynth with 70’s Electro Harmonix badging. Snatched it up obviously, messed with it for a while (tracked guitar input, no cv or midi) and tried to find any info on it online, no luck. So I took some photos and emailed Mike Matthews himself to ask him what it was… he wrote back right away that he had forgotten about having built it (!) but it was a prototype of a synth project that had to be scrapped due to budget constraints, and he thought only two or three were ever made.

So (long story short) I put it on EBay and it sold for $1400 :slight_smile:

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#75

Big respect!

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#76

Pennysaver!..OC?!

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#77

Everything from the collection that I’ve picked up second hand. They’ve pretty much all needed some degree of repair when they came to me.

Biggest gainers are probably

Roland Jupiter 4 (x2)
Sequential Pro One
Korg MS 10 (35 filter)
Korg PolySix
DSI MEK & PEK

The rest are going for a lot more than I paid but I’ve been buying gear for donkeys years. It’s all academic tho as I collect rather than flip.

#78

The only thing that might come close to this is my Monomachine (mk1). But I almost never sell things so there might be plenty of contenders lying around in my closets and drawers :slight_smile:

The one time I actually sold something, to minimise unused gear. The shop I went to didn’t have anything I wanted so I ended up with a voucher that I later lost :tired_face: Not doing that again.

So if I ever end up with something worth more than what I bought it for. I’m likely not gonna be benefitted from it.

#79

I sold pretty much all of my vintage Roland & Korg stuff about 10 years ago - just an SH-101 & JU-106 left … prices have gone up crazy since then.

I did take delivery of a new K-ARP 2600 FS back in May : I guess I could probably sell that tomorrow & make over at least a £ grand flipping it … & I guess they may continue to go up in price if Korg really do never make another batch. Not that I’d ever sell it… :grinning:

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#80

I got a juno 60 in 2010 for 600 bucks lol.

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