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Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2022 2:05 pm
by poodling around

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2022 7:00 pm
by Steve
Well they can **** off as far as I'm concerned now. If it's really for sale unreserved this time, I presume they'll create a fake bid to at least match the one I gave them which they never even had the courtesy to respond to. I gave them heaps of information and by all accounts was the only person to even make an offer on it which was apparently very generous.

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Sat Nov 26, 2022 7:00 am
by epigramophone

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:05 am
by Steve
Passed over again.

Should have accepted my original offer!

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:48 am
by poodling around
Steve wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:05 am Passed over again.

Should have accepted my original offer!
I have to say that I was very surprised that it ddn't sell for £ 700.

Surely the EMG soundbox was worth more than that never mind the tone arm etc.

Weird.

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:49 am
by poodling around
poodling around wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:48 am
Steve wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:05 am Passed over again.

Should have accepted my original offer!
I have to say that I was very surprised that it didn't sell for £ 700.

Surely the EMG soundbox was worth more than that never mind the tone arm etc.

Weird.

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Tue Dec 13, 2022 8:04 am
by Steve
poodling around wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:48 am
Steve wrote: Tue Dec 13, 2022 6:05 am Passed over again.

Should have accepted my original offer!
I have to say that I was very surprised that it ddn't sell for £ 700.

Surely the EMG soundbox was worth more than that never mind the tone arm etc.

Weird.
It is weird indeed. The longer I collect, the less I understand pricing strategies or other collectors' perceived notions of "value". EMG's or largely EMG based machines usually sell very well. By all accounts this is an EMG machine contained in a modified (rare) oak HMV Junior Grand. The Wilson Horn conversion of an HMV 510 I owned some years ago sold for £2000 with a reproduction horn, albeit not by me!

The motor must be worth £100, the arm £200, soundbox £600 and that's before we get to the horn, which although badly damaged (unreported by the auctioneers but pointed out by me multiple times, including to them!) must be worth £500, surely? Where will you find another Wilson Horn? That gets us to £1400. How much is it worth as a complete and working machine, more than the sum of the parts or not? If there is doubt over its authenticity as an EMG item maybe EMG buyers don't want it but also crucially don't want to break it up either for parts. I offered £1300 plus 22% commission which although they acknowledged my email never received a reply with the vendor's response. I was not kept informed about the intention to retry it at auction either which might be auctioneers' modus operandi, I don't know, but it seems a stubbornly counter-productive way of operating in my opinion, if you actually want to sell something. I might have been prepared to negotiate higher too.

As it stands, as I've recently acquired another rarity with a hefty price tag, my offer would be less today, considerably so, especially now that it's failed for a second time to get a bid of £700! Darn fools!

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2022 7:44 am
by Oedipus
The value of a gramophone at auction seldom depends on the sum of values of its components -- even when those values are estimated rather more conservatively than by Steve. That's just as well, or even more gramophones would be bought for breaking up. And this gramophone is compromised by the mere fact of having appeared at auction, unsuccessfully, in recent months -- it is now 'stale' on the market.
I don't know how easy it would be to get £100 for a Garrard Super motor, but only one or two of us knew that it had one -- the auctioneers, choosing to believe the not-very-knowledgeable vendor, described it as having a 'four-spring' motor, something that Garrard never made, as far as I know!

For what it's worth, when I visited the saleroom after the first offering (to collect something else that I had bought), I commented to the auctioneers that I was not surprised at its failure to sell, as I had expected it to make about £800. Now it can't even do that! I had another look at the horn, incidentally, and the damage that Steve refers to did not seem to me to be very serious. If I had the space, I would happily buy it back now for £800, even though, when I sold it thirty years ago, it made all of £90.

Re: EMG Conversion with Wilson horn.

Posted: Mon Dec 19, 2022 8:05 am
by Steve
Oedipus wrote: Mon Dec 19, 2022 7:44 am The value of a gramophone at auction seldom depends on the sum of values of its components -- even when those values are estimated rather more conservatively than by Steve. That's just as well, or even more gramophones would be bought for breaking up. And this gramophone is compromised by the mere fact of having appeared at auction, unsuccessfully, in recent months -- it is now 'stale' on the market.
I don't know how easy it would be to get £100 for a Garrard Super motor, but only one or two of us knew that it had one -- the auctioneers, choosing to believe the not-very-knowledgeable vendor, described it as having a 'four-spring' motor, something that Garrard never made, as far as I know!

For what it's worth, when I visited the saleroom after the first offering (to collect something else that I had bought), I commented to the auctioneers that I was not surprised at its failure to sell, as I had expected it to make about £800. Now it can't even do that! I had another look at the horn, incidentally, and the damage that Steve refers to did not seem to me to be very serious. If I had the space, I would happily buy it back now for £800, even though, when I sold it thirty years ago, it made all of £90.
Yes, I realise a gramophone rarely makes the sum of its parts but when ONE single part, usually in high demand as a spare ie. the soundbox, would make more than this machine failed to get a starting bid for, you have to wonder what's going on. Now, I'm not condoning the practise of buying machines to break them up but I've seen a few examples of "EMG's" which have been cheapened by the substitution of the original soundbox for a mass produced Meltrope, whereby the seller retained the EMG soundbox for more lucrative purposes. This gramophone is one such example where this could have feasibly happened, especially given that few people believe it is even a genuine EMG conversion.

Anyway, if you do manage to get it for £800, please congratulate the auctioneers on my behalf for their incompetence as they would have lost the vendor at least another £500 plus commission. I realise it might be the vendors own fault but surely the auctioneers must have some capacity to influence the outcome more positively? I have to say I didn't care much for the attitude of the staff I spoke to about this lot. It wasn't really conducive to a successful negotiation or sale.

Incidentally, someone, either the vendor or the auctioneers, still clearly believes this gramophone is worth over £2000! It's all quite puzzling.

I'm tempted to renew my offer now to £801! :lol: