Not as bad as you might think. The main thing is that all of the Russian ebay and reverb sellers are gone, and I would expect there are fewer Ukrainian sellers too. Pre-war I bought a bunch of Soviet camera lenses and a lot of those sellers were Russian, and I'd expect that to be the case with mics too (more even, since Soviet lenses were largely produced in Ukraine but microphones were made in Russia). So I think the pickings are slimmer. I didn't really get into this until after the war started so my sense is that prices are higher now too but I can't really confirm.
There does seem to be a bunch of stuff out there still though. Of course I'm looking for mics that are tested and can actually be used, which limits my options a lot - lots of ephemera dealers just throw stuff online without seeing whether or not it works, but I'm not looking for props or decoration. It seems like there's plenty of that stuff.
Shipping times didn't seem very badly affected, surprisingly. Express mail service between Belarus and Colombia has closed down so I had to route some things through the United States - I don't know why Belarus can still ship things to the United States, but it can. I got some mics from a guy in Kryvyi Rih, which is pretty close to the southern front, and they spent as much time in Colombian customs as they did in transit.
I've started collecting Soviet microphones
I don't even do a ton of recording, I play music but I don't have a good space. And still the boxes from Ukraine and Belarus keep coming
Has the war made it a pain in the ass to buy Soviet ephemera?
Edit: Not trying to put treats over people's lives being affected by a war, just genuinely curious.
Not as bad as you might think. The main thing is that all of the Russian ebay and reverb sellers are gone, and I would expect there are fewer Ukrainian sellers too. Pre-war I bought a bunch of Soviet camera lenses and a lot of those sellers were Russian, and I'd expect that to be the case with mics too (more even, since Soviet lenses were largely produced in Ukraine but microphones were made in Russia). So I think the pickings are slimmer. I didn't really get into this until after the war started so my sense is that prices are higher now too but I can't really confirm.
There does seem to be a bunch of stuff out there still though. Of course I'm looking for mics that are tested and can actually be used, which limits my options a lot - lots of ephemera dealers just throw stuff online without seeing whether or not it works, but I'm not looking for props or decoration. It seems like there's plenty of that stuff.
Shipping times didn't seem very badly affected, surprisingly. Express mail service between Belarus and Colombia has closed down so I had to route some things through the United States - I don't know why Belarus can still ship things to the United States, but it can. I got some mics from a guy in Kryvyi Rih, which is pretty close to the southern front, and they spent as much time in Colombian customs as they did in transit.