Vintage synths no longer synths but art objects

[foosnark]

Depends on what you consider a "good acoustic piano". Is a Yamaha Baby Grand good enough for you?

I'm not really a serious piano player, so I'm not the one to ask. My mom had a beat-up, out of tune, janky upright throughout my childhood and that was "good enough" for 10 year old me.


As far as "beautiful" synths go, I find some of the more recent Moog stuff damn pretty in person, considerably more so than their older gear. Some synths look like lab equipment, some are weird plastic abominations, some are okay, a few are kind of nice to look at but not great visual museum pieces or anything.

Prices are weird. People are weird.

I think even if I won the lottery and was building a synth room, I wouldn't go for a collection of vintage synths -- maybe something like a CS-80. I'd be more likely to go for the oddball boutique stuff, and build a few single-manufacturer-focused Eurorack systems to act as independent instruments (kind of like what Nathan Moody did with his Blue Box and Red Box).

[IncarnateX]

Looks they're going for at most 50-80% of new price, when adjusted for inflation.

Of course. In the 80s I once saw a tv show about rock bands in the DDR. They complained that they could not compete with the sound of western bands because the price of e.g. a DX7 was a year’s income to them. However we did not have all those cheaper and massproduced alternatives then. Besides, the vintage classics took a deep dive on the second hand market when workstations like M1 entered the scene. I remember seeing a JP4 as low as 310$. Got mine (my first real synth) for the double amount a few years before. At our local second hand market, you could get a JP8 for about 1600$.

[sprnva]

$250,000 guitar
$50,000 amp

And those weren't even the most expensive...

[Mushy Mushy]

I thought I replied to this already.... hmmmm

You cannot put a price on childhood dreams and nostalgia. How does one get through a midlife crisis? By fulfilling ones childhood dreams.

Say you’re 15 and you worship Vangelis but have no job and cannot therefore buy his synth. Now XX years down the line you have a massive pension pot you don’t know how to spend. £20k on a CS80 sounds perfectly reasonable. £25k? Ok then.

[vurt]

the only part that bothers me, any musical instrument bought by collectors rather than someone who will use it.
its sad, that poor instrument desires to make music/noise as much as you or i, then some evil bastard imprisons it, in silence

[thecontrolcentre]