20 Tubas

[Gator]

http://www.ebay.com/itm/20-COUESNON-Fra ... 5ae82c81e6

[Dan Schultz]

Yikes! It looks like the French Army! Run!

[Donn]

Interesting opportunity to consider the notion of market saturation. I'm assuming that, somewhere along the line as these tubas change hands, someone's going to try to sell them individually, one by one, to people who will play them. If you reckon you could sell one for "a couple hundred", then can you sell 20 for the same price? or do 20 tubas really have a lower value in the aggregate than 20 times the value of one of them? (I suppose it depends a lot on the market response - value could even go up if early buyers created a positive word-of-mouth effect, though that doesn't seem very likely in this case.)

Anyway, it's something to think about. Among other things, market saturation is part of the reason multi-level marketing is inevitably a scam.

[windshieldbug]

Interesting notion. French Ponzi scheme. Until someone plays one.

[Tom Coffey]

There are also some other Couesnon horns from the same seller listed separately. One looks like an Eb tuba with the (fixed) bell at an unusal angle, and one is a three valve euphonium with the valves on the top bow area. Interesting horns, but also priced a little high. In addition, this seller usually has a pretty abrupt term disallowing local pickup (we are a warehouse shipping business, not a retail store). It does not seem to apply here, but it puts me off, because it makes me wonder if the seller is protecting a profit on shipping. I like the compact size of these horns, but the price is too high to sample one.
I do wonder where 20 of these came from all at once...
Eb: http://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-COUESNO ... 337903efe9" target="_blank" target="_blank
Euphonium: http://www.ebay.com/itm/COUESNON-France ... 3378c4d46e" target="_blank

[bort]

The post says both "sorry we don't allow local pickups" and "local pickup only."

When something both MUST be shipped and MUST NOT be shipped, it means that it's not going anywhere. Which is exactly what I think will happen with these, they aren't going anywhere.

[Dan Schultz]

I've seen many Couesnon tubas. The local school system must have bought this amount or more Eb and BBb tubas like this back 'in the day'. Apparently... there were some school purchasing agents getting free vacations on the French Riviera in the 60's and 70's.

As far as I'm concerned... the only good things that came out of the Couesnon factory is their flugelhorns!

At the current rate for scrap brass... I'd estimate this lot of 20 to be worth something like $300-400 by the time you pay for shipping and hauling them to the scrap yard.

[eupher61]

That guy/company has music things all the time. It's not a store or anything specifically music, not even a store. It's purely a scrapyard for junk like this that
they buy at auction. They don't want to deal with people coming by to look at stuff before buying. It's about 60 miles from me, and I've been there. Not everything is JUNK, but
most of it is pretty worthless.

[J.c. Sherman]

The Couesnon flugs are incredible, and I had a fantastic peashooter trombone (Lafayette) that I plumb wore out!

But the tubas... never tried the Eb, and you have to work hard to get the tubas to play properly.. and even then... it's a "who cares" sound.

J.c.S.