Hacker sovereign prices

[martin.m]

I was thinking of getting myself a "vintage" transistor radio and understand that Hacker models are highly regarded for their good quality sound. Checking the sold prices for Hacker Sovereigns on an online auction site I found a wild variation in prices starting from under £20 to three figure sums. One RP75 had sold for £910 while another had made £950. Are these radios heading the same way as Leak valve amplifiers and Garrard 301 turntables? What should I look out for if buying online? A cheap one to repair would be fine.

[Paul_RK]

Ignore prices much above say £250 for a Super Sovereign, £150 for any other standard Sovereign (a really nice "jade" or Golden Sovereign might nudge £250 too), unless condition is truly exceptional (i.e. more or less as new and probably complete with box etc.). They're not real, and with AM broadcasting fast vanishing and FM under threat there's no way the prices of Hacker portables - most of which are still pretty common - will go the way of those still very usable, if arguably over-hyped, audio items.

One main thing to look closely at if you're thinking of a Sovereign III or IV or Super Sovereign is the condition of the screen-printed top plate. The printing is easily lost, and if you want to end up with a completely presentable radio it's about the hardest thing to restore.

Paul

[Radio Wrangler]

I bought a Hacker Herald some time ago in nice clean condition a few years ago. £20 if my memory is right. MW/LW only and a gorgeous sound. My neighbour admires it.

On a trip further North I was offered some portables from a collection being re-homed and they joked about filling my car to make themselves some space... did I want any radiograms

I wound up coming back South with another Herald, covered in splashes of gloss paint and a Sovereign II with bits missing.

I've fixed the Herald and my neighbour has spent days picking gloss paint off of its vinyl. It looks and sounds superb and he's very very delighted. It has pride of place in his garage cum music room.

I've not got round to starting on the Sovereign yet. I'll need to ask around for some spares (Handle, antenna and one big knob missing) and I'll have to re-cover it. the vinyl is torn and ratted.

At the Port Seton amateur radio doo in August there was a Hacker Helmsman (the short wave one) being sold on one stall. Unfortunately someone else was in the act of buying it as I spotted it. I think it was sold for £30. I wouldn't have hesitated!

So Hackers change hands for all sorts of prices. I owe David, Duncan and the gang up in the North East a large favour. I'll have to think of something for the next time I'm up that way.

The Leak amps and the Garrard 301s have a mystical glamour. Some audible characteristic that only true believers can hear and the prices have gone crazy as true believers fight over limited numbers. I don't see this sort of effect bubbling Hacker prices.

A more relevant price bubble is the R1155 and T1154. These radios were famously in WWII bombers and it seems enough people want one to push prices up remarkably high, especially for rare acessories that got binned in days gone by. It's just nostalgia, I suppose. Otherwise where would they stop? Would they build a whole Lancaster and who would they want to bomb with it? Oddly the BC348 receiver was also used in a lot of Lancs but hasn't suffered the same charm. HRO and AR88 receivers were far superior in the same era and still have reasonable prices. There hasn't been a codebreaker-inspired surge despite their history.

So no, I think Hackers are safe from hype. Those prices must have happened when rival hipsters spotted one and thought it was 'cool' or 'hot' or 'Rad' or whatever.

David

[Nuvistor]

I always thought the RP38A Hunter was one of the best of the range, just a personal choice.

My RP38A (given to me, lucky boy) has the receipt with it for £51.30 in 1976. Which is £258.17 according to one online calculator.

[nebogipfel]

It looks like Hacker and Roberts radio prices are on the increase if sets sold through Ebay are any sort of guide. You do have to ignore the try it on "buy it now" prices of course.

[G6Tanuki]

I guess it's a case of "it depends"....

The value of something is only ever what someone-else is prepared to pay for it. There are some people out there who will pay silly-money for things - good luck to the sellers who play along with this game in order to get richer. (what is it they say: a fool and his money are easily parted?)

Not Hacker-specific, but I've got several Roberts radios here (606, 707, and a R24) - models which sometimes sell for what I consider truly silly amounts. I've never paid more than £5 to acquire a working one!

Wouldn't mind a Helmsman myself: cosmetic condition would be largely irrelevant and I wouldn't pay more than a tenner.

[Studio263]

Still plenty of choice in Hackers at the car boot for under £20, there's no need to pay silly money. Actually all the good ones are there if you look, Hackers, big Roberts, Yacht Boys, Beolits etc, you just have to be prepared to get up early every Sunday morning and trudge around. I've not found a Braun T1000 for a fiver yet, but it is surely only a matter of time.

RP38A 'Hunter' seconded as the Hacker 'best buy'. A fine sounding radio built in the Hacker tradition and no issues with the sponge backing of the rexine covering crumbling away and leaving the rest of the radio looking baggy. If you prefer Roberts then the R606-MB would be my choice - good quality and seemingly none of the difficult to fix IF problems that dog the 700 / 707. I've got a green one which I use at work, I had to turn up a few new knob caps on the lathe but otherwise it looks nearly new. Left over at the end of a auction, £free.

[Mike. Watterson]

Always search sold prices. Ignore Buy Now and Start prices of current auctions.
Hackers are I think better than Roberts. One issue is jack sockets, the Roberts used an incompatible type for longer. Also it's very hard to open and replace the AF117 transistors in Roberts use of Mullard modules.
Another consideration is maximum VHF frequency, between 101MHz and 108MHz depending on model.
There are some excellent Asian sets in plastic film covered chipboard or rexine like covered cardboard.
The biggest issue of new sets is cost reduction: Too small speakers, a headphone amplifier used to drive speaker, or even switching from using a Superhet IC with RF tuning and ceramic IF filters to a DSP chip without any RF filtering, so prone to whistles and other noise, often with no change in model number.
You can buy a Stereo Bluetooth receiver with 3.5mm jack outlet powered off 5V for lesst than £6 on eBay. Allows any old set with Gram/PU or Tape to playback phone (MP3 or Streaming). TV sound bars and BT speakers are mostly poorer sound than 1950 to 1980 TVs or Radios due to small plastic cabinets and speakers often no better than a Hong Kong 1966 pocket radio.

[David G4EBT]

Originally Posted by martin.m

Checking the sold prices for Hacker Sovereigns on an online auction site I found a wild variation in prices starting from under £20 to three figure sums. One RP75 had sold for £910 while another had made £950.

They were non-paying bidders, so the figures don't reflect reality.

[martin.m]

Thank heavens for that. How can you tell if winning bidders were non paying though?

Regards
Martin

[barrymagrec]

I was given a Hacker Mini-Herald around 1964 as it was not working - OC81 in the amp was duff replaced with a 2G382 - worked a treat. I loved that radio and later took it with me all over the place including overland to India and back in 1977 - it was eventually stolen out of the Van in Algeria in 1979.

Hacker are great radios in my experience.

[David G4EBT]

Originally Posted by martin.m

Thank heavens for that. How can you tell if winning bidders were non paying though?

As often as not, the disgruntled (non)seller re-lists it with comments about 'time-wasters', or caveats such as "do not bid unless you have a feedback score of 50 transactions or more". This isn't unique to radios - it happens with all sorts of things - laptops, phones, Dansettes etc.

There was a thread back in May in the Hacker Radio Group of which I'm a (not very active) member, where a Sovereign went for an alleged £1,200, except of course that it didn't. A glance at the bidding history when the auction was live showed that something was a bit iffy with the bidding. At the time, I commented thus:

Quote:

In all, there were 65 bids by seven bidders over seven days. Of those bids, 42 were by one bidder, and of those 42 bids, there were 30 in a row, increasing incrementally from £430 to £2,100 with no bids from any other bidders.

That makes no sense to me.

It's like going to a conventional auction, and bidding up to £430 for an item, then when the auctioneer says 'do I hear £440?' you answer "yes", and each time he invites higher bids, you continue to say yes on 29 more occasions with no other bidders in the game till you get to £2,100. You can of course leave a maximum bid with e-bay, which will automatically increment when other bidders make a bid until either your maximum bid in exceeded, in which case you lose the auction, or if not exceeded, you win it. At £2,100, there was then a bid of £2,150 from another bidder, (really) then a final bid of £2,200 from the '30 bids in a row' bidder who won the auction.

That all looks very iffy to me. If it is indeed genuine, I think the seller might want to think twice about his £7.00 'Economy shipping'!

David.

End quote.

Inevitably it was indeed a non-paying bidder and the radio was re-listed, eventually selling for an agreed price of £400, so even then, at that price, someone must have let an obsession triumph over common sense. (In my view). It's not a problem for me - I haven't got one, and don't want one, so I'm just a bemused bystander!

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/...ns/topics/6688

[ms660]

For non payment, sometimes the seller will relist more or less straight away, sometimes they might leave relisting it for weeks or months, sometimes they do a private deal behind the scenes, the buyers that purposely damage what they have received in order to get a refund for whatever their reason might be are the worst, there's plenty of them out there too.

Lawrence.

[nebogipfel]

All this is true and there is a great deal of nonsense on Ebay but the fact remains that since I have been interested in them particularly Hacker prices have increased and I am referring to genuine completed sales not Fantasy Island.

[mhennessy]

Originally Posted by David G4EBT

There was a thread back in May in the Hacker Radio Group of which I'm a (not very active) member, where a Sovereign went for an alleged £1,200, except of course that it didn't. A glance at the bidding history when the auction was live showed that something was a bit iffy with the bidding.

Hi Dave,

You might have missed it at the time (quite a lot of the emails from Yahoo fail to reach me, and reading the messages on-line is pretty painful), but in reply to that, I did reply:

Ah - that confused me initially, but it's because there were actually 2 bidders with very similar display names: 1***1 (40) and 1***i (29). That lower-case "i" is easy to miss at a glance.

1***i (29) placed a bid for £2000 on the 21st of May, and 1***1 (40) placed all those other bids on the 23rd - each time he/she would have been instantly automatically outbid by the earlier bid placed by 1***i (23), until eventually the bid for £2100 was high enough to top the £2000 put down earlier. He/she then came back to outbid r***a the next day.

(Hope I got all that right - it's late!).

I suspect that 1***1 (40) was just having a bit of fun finding out what the others had bid up to. Perhaps 1***i (29) was also being silly, or perhaps he/she really wanted it, but assumed that they wouldn't have had to pay anything like the full £2000. What about r**a? Was that someone playing the same game, or was he/she really willing to pay £2150 for it? I suspect the former...

Not wishing to get too into a discussion about eBay for obvious reasons, but at least there was an explanation of sorts. As I say, it initially confused me until I looked closely at the detail.

Either way, I'm sure the bubble - such that it is - will burst the very instant I start to sell off some of mine

Hope that helps,

Mark

[AC/HL]

Not wishing to get too into a discussion about eBay for obvious reasons, but at least there was an explanation of sorts.

Please bear the eBay rules in mind in any further posts in this thread.

[Karen O]

The interweb is full of (ro-)bots, some mischievous, some malevolent.

[Radio Wrangler]

If all you want to do is find out the prevailing value of something, then you have to weed out the fake data and try to find where reality begins.

Once upon a time there weren't so many scamsters and they concentrated on high value, high desirability bait. They were after money and wanted lots of it. They dangled cut-price non-existent iPads and Subaru WRXs.

Automation has allowed them to go for very large numbers of very small value scams. Nothing seems safe any longer.

In this case, I don't see any profit for the perpetrator unless they're extorting money from the auctioneers. It looks like schoolboy mischief. Hope their spots all burst at once!

David

[stitch1]

Originally Posted by martin.m

I was thinking of getting myself a "vintage" transistor radio and understand that Hacker models are highly regarded for their good quality sound. Checking the sold prices for Hacker Sovereigns on an online auction site I found a wild variation in prices starting from under £20 to three figure sums. One RP75 had sold for £910 while another had made £950. Are these radios heading the same way as Leak valve amplifiers and Garrard 301 turntables? What should I look out for if buying online? A cheap one to repair would be fine.

Have a look on Gumtree, someone in Gateshead is selling Sovereign, Sovereign II and an RP37A for £50 each, they look ok but tranistor radios aren’t my thing so I don’t know if that’s good value or not.

John