Why Golden Era?

We started Golden Era, LLC because one day, I looked around and saw two gaps in this marketplace. The first gap concerned student musicians. Yes, there are many places kids and their parents can purchase band instruments. As traditional music stores continue to close across the nation, more and more are buying these online and as so much of instrument making has been offshored to places like China, old technicians like me realize that the quality of these instruments simply doesn’t measure up to the quality of instruments manufactured in this country in the past. I saw an opportunity to purchase these older higher-quality instruments, restore these to their proper condition and provide those wanting both quality and affordable price an option. This is especially true for aspiring younger players needing a good intermediate grade instruments on a budget.

The second gap involves adults that love and appreciate the great old instruments of yesterday! While there are certainly great quality professional grade instruments available (with prices to match) and even vintage shops catering to the upper-end collectible market for pricy “dream horns”  and we have no quarrel with those; we saw a genuine need for a broad category of older professional grade American and French made instruments that were great in their day and still great today after we refurbish these. Clarinets like Selmer, Leblanc, and Buffet and Saxophones like Conn, Buescher, Martin, and King. We understand and love these vintage instruments and want to focus on these.

Our market is therefore, a very small part of the overall musical instrument market and we are comfortable with this. Our shop is small, and we intend to keep it that way. To our customers this means:

• We can’t sell you our restored instrument as cheaply as you can buy one that needs a lot of work for on eBay or Craigslist. We can and will however sell ours at a good value. A sizable portion of our price involves our labor.
• You won’t find us a source for cheap low-quality instruments that have now flooded the market. We can fix a quality instrument and restore it to its original condition but can’t make a good instrument out of a bad one.
• We are not interested in trying to convince you that our $300 student model clarinet or $400 intermediate model clarinet plays just as well on all points as someone else's $3,500 professional clarinet.
• We want our customers to be satisfied with the instrument they purchased from us. If we can’t satisfy you, we will cheerfully refund your money when you return the instrument to us. We offer a two-week trial period on all our instruments. We believe this is adequate time to make a purchase decision. Since our shipping rates aren’t padded with extras we cannot afford to refund shipping costs. 

When you repair and restore instruments for sixty years, you learn a lot about these, and we have! While we have no interest in endless Internet debates and opinions about instruments, we will happily answer questions asked of us and if we can’t, we’ll readily admit it. This blog is a great place to ask such questions. ~ Charles