The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Friend of mine sent me attached clip of this program "Bares für Rares" on German TV, where "experts" give advice to people who have never heard of google but have things to sell, and they then may be nominated to go on to a room with 5 titans of the German antiques trade who make them offers for their items.

https://www.zdf.de/show/bares-fuer-rare ... 0-100.html

at 6.30 minutes - Very nice German Kaiser 25th Anniversary record (there were about 10 variants) arrives in a metal suitcase for protection, Seller wants over $10'000 for it. Expert says only 35 pressings of each (do not think this is correct as their purpose was to raise money for charities, like in this case a Children's Home). To their credit they do not let him loose to the antique dealers. (Real value is a few hundred)

at 33.35 an Edison Gem - few minutes of bla bla /
need to jump to 52.14 - where one resident genius tries to squeeze a wax cylinder onto the Gem the wrong way round with expected results.

Yes, I watched that show as well. It always proves that nobody can be an expert on everything. It's ok to watch if it's nothing you don't know more about than their experts, then it gets cringe-worthy. Don't get me started on some of the antique dealers. I found it interesting that the seller charged 20 euros for the broken cylinder without even looking which title it was. Shows either that the seller knew he only had cheaper average cylinders in the collection, or he didn't know anything about them at all (more likely). I found it interesting that the GEM was valued at 800 euros. A while ago they had an average Edison Standard that they valued at 450 euros I think. And another time they had a beautiful round Indian Crapophone that the expert was very impressed with and said it was authentic and valued around 1000 euros. Fortunately they had an antique dealer there who immediately recognized it as fake.

The beauty of reality TV shows...

Andreas

Since I'm perhaps mathematically challenged, I've just had an explanation as to how the vendor reached his euro 10,500 price valuation.

He had seen a similar record at auction fetch 600 or 700 euro. Condition wise he had rated that record at about a 5 out of 100. (see where this is going....?). His example he rated more of a 90 out of 100 points.

So using a bit of calculus, twin prime, the Collatz Conjecture, and some of the Riemann Hypothesis, he came up with his valuation, based on the condition of his being 15 to 18x better than the 700 euro record and thus the price of his should correctly be around 15x more.