Amid a booming celebrity guitar market a set of turntables owned by Paul Oakenfeld, one of the biggest names in dance music, will be auctioned in Los Angeles this month.
The signed set of three turntables are Technics SL-1200M3D and come with everything you need to spin your own tunes: CD players, a filter, eq, headphones, mixers and processors and a flight case to store them in.
They date back to the early 21st century, when Oakenfold toured with Moby pumping out tunes from this desk.
With a high estimate of $40,000, they are the top item in the Paul Oakenfold Ready, Steady, Bid sale that closes in Los Angeles on March 28.
Julien’s Auctions are handling the sale that include gold records, music awards, and a plethora or early memorabilia from the rave scene that Oakenfeld helped pioneer.
An early acid house poster from Spectrum shows the psychedelic aesthetic the genre repurposed for the 1980s. Image courtesy Julien’s Auctions.
They include flyers and posters from ground-breaking acid house clubs Spectrum and Zoom.
Oakenfold was born in London in 1963. He became a DJ in the early 80s and skipped through genres, including New York’s hip hop scene, before a trip to Ibiza in 1987 introduced him to acid house.
With a group of friends, including Danny Rampling, another star DJ, he bought the style back to the UK and started to produce his own tracks and remixes.
He has DJd on major tours and was the first DJ to play the main stage at Glastonbury in 1999.
Some Technics gear is collectible in its own right. They are the top brand by some distance in the turntable market. In 2018 they released a special edition SL-1000R that sold for $20,000.
But how DJs stand in the collectibles market is something of an untested proposition at the moment.
Signed items from David Guetta have sold for hundreds of pounds at auction for example.
DJs like Guetta are undoubtedly stars, they earn huge fees to entertain enormous crowds. And electronic music – in all its forms – is the soundtrack of the world.
But, the gear used to make it has yet to match the prices paid for rock stars’ guitars.
Some gear has become valuable, notably Akai MPC samplers/drum machines/sequences, that were so important in the creation of hip hop, but it’s hard to find examples of star-owned machines selling.
In July 2023, an E-mu SP-1200 used by the RZA to produce the Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the Wu-Tang album sold for just under $70,000 in New York.
The Oakenfold sale will be an interesting test of this market, and, if you’re a traditionalist you’ll also find plenty of guitars listed.
