To put an oar in -- my experience is more with radios and antique cars,
but some things apply just the same.  In radio collecting, saturation
is an important factor.

Experience with French radios at the Galerie de Chartres in France
shows that the bottom has fallen out of the market for 1930s and '40s
radios unless they are exceptional pieces.  Run-of-the-mill battery
sets from the 1920s have done the same thing.

I think there are two factors, one being that most everybody has one
now, the other being that the younger, newer collectors are interested
in things they knew as youngsters.  You can see this in car collecting,
where it is easier to sell a 1950s or '60s car to younger people than,
say, a 1922 Studebaker.  Many younger people collect transistor radios
from the '50s and '60s.

Another factor is trendiness, or "what's hot".  We've all seen
"Antiques Road Show" at some point, and with the new retrospective
shows it's easy to see that fashions change in antiques as in other
domains.  Lately, furniture seems to be a really hard sell.  A slacking
in demand, because people are interested in other things, or are
younger and have less money might in part account for what happened
to musical instruments.  It seems to have happened to the famous
Atwater-Kent "breadboard" radio; I remember a time not so long ago
when you could almost name your price for a Model 12.

Someone recently mentioned that you can't expect to get all the money
you put into a restoration, and it is certainly true of cars.  You can
spend $30,000 to restore a car like a 1937 Chevrolet 2-door, to find
that it might bring $17,500 when you're done.  Unfortunately this means
that such cars don't get restored and the restorers don't get to do the
work.

One reason obviously is the price of services like plating and painting
that manufacturers can do in huge lots but small shops can't.  Another
is that restoration is many hours of detailed hand work, work originally
done on assembly lines with new materials. I recently rebuilt my Black
Forest clock to play music, and if I had tried to farm that out it
might have cost me fifty thousand dollars for the labor, as it needed
so much.

Mechanical music will surely come back some day, and furniture will
come back some day.  The risk is that the instruments and highboys
can't always wait and hope to find housing until they do.  Museums have
only so many resources.

I collected radios because I like them.  Along the way some came to be
worth something.  Buying them as an investment has not paid off very
well .

Richard Foster