How to price zildjian 22" 60's or 70's ride - Page 1

Here is your pricing context:

http://black.net.nz/avedis/avedis-prices.html#22

I now have data through the end of Nov 2017 and I'm working on an updated analysis with a much larger sample size. The larger sample size means I can do more analysis, but I don't expect the median prices to change.

There isn't much in the price difference between 60s and 70s, but you are changing production methods. You might prefer the sound of the 70s or the 60s. It's up to individual taste.

Hazelshould (Gerry) is a good guy and he has a site where you can buy direct and save the eBay part of the price. Here it is for $200 bought directly from Gerry.

http://www.hazelshould.com/products/cymbals/zildjian/12055

In my experience, getting a sound file (even a poor quality one) is better than not getting a sound file. You can only get so far imagining what a cymbal will sound like based on production era and weight.

You do need to watch out for identification of production era on places like eBay because the level of accuracy isn't good enough. I've just completed a little look at that by way of a confusion matrix. What's a confusion matrix I hear you ask? This is:

[img]http://black.net.nz/avedis/images/pretty-A-mat.png[/img]

Across the top are the identifications the seller gave, and on the left are my assessment of what the cymbal actually is based on the criteria I've published. Usually my identification is on the basis of the trademark stamp, but ink gets involved from the late 70s. If you look for a particular Era like T (Trans Stamp) you can see that there were 139 correctly identified, but the sellers also misidentified 1 F (First Stamp), 1 L (Large Stamp), 8 S (Small Stamps), and 5 1960s cymbals as Trans Stamps. The M category is "Modern" which means since laser stamps (1994). I couldn't call that category L because L was already taken by Large (mid 50s). So it became "M".

This matrix is based on 2016 and 2017 data (I started keeping close track of seller id versus my id in early 2016) and I've now got 1305 cymbals to work with. The sample comes mostly from eBay sellers with a smaller number from CH, DFO, Reverb, and misc other online sellers. Note that I've only gone to the higher level of Production Era, so if the seller says "1940s Trans stamp" or even "1940s cymbal" and it is a T3 or T4 (which are actually early 1950s) I've still given them full credit for their answer (coded [color=green]Green[/color]). So this is fairly forgiving in terms of analysis. I still have a residual category "50" in here because often that's all the seller says and I can't just allocate those out to Small, Large, and Trans Types 3 & 4 because who knows what they were basing their claim on. The second largest group of cymbals called "50s" by sellers is actually 18 cymbals with a 1960s stamp. That raises the question of interpretation when a cymbal looks like it was hammered and lathed in the 1950s but has a 1960s stamp. What proportion of the sellers actually understand how to recognize the different hammering and lathing styles of the late 50s, and that's why they said "50s"? We've created an ongoing problem by following the convention of letting the trademark stamp stand in for the whole cymbal. So we've got problems when some cymbals don't fit neatly into the "stamp boxes" or "decade boxes" we want to put them in for descriptive purposes.

Confused yet? Here's the quick summary:

So about 13% of sales have stamp identifications which are incorrect even after being charitable in some cases. The answers I've treated as "correct" are in green.

In about 10% of sales, the seller makes no attempt to identify the era of cymbal and just uses weasel words like "old", "vintage", "early" and a phrase which is a great way to avoid being specific: "50s/60s/70s". Of those 130 which weren't identified it was easy for me to identify all but 9. Those 9 had no stamp photos in focus, or only distance shots of the cymbal where you couldn't see any identifying information at all. Oh, and there was 1 cymbal which was identified by the seller as "50s" but I couldn't confirm it -- again because of a lack of decent photos.

Hope this helps. Enjoy the hunt.