Berkeley Silver and Gold Engraved Art Flugelhorn with wood case
This could have been a nice horn. Could have been. See negatives later.

Positives
The Berkeley flugelhorn has a warm, fat tone, smooth sound, and decent valves. The horn has an interesting design, is nice looking, has a decent feel to it. The mouthpiece that came with it was adequate for me and contributed to to its rich, smooth dark tone. Pulling out the first and third valve slides to adjust for the usually sharp low C# and D fixes these notes just fine. Pulling out the first valve slide too much made middle C (on the staff) go flat. At least that's how I experienced it. The wood case is sturdy and nice looking. It has room for two mouthpieces and comes with a generic flugelhorn mouthpiece. Probably a 7C.

I made an offer of $120.00 and the seller accepted it. California tax was tacked on.

Negatives
A connection point leaks: coming from the mouth pipe into the third valve casing. See picture above, where the yellow arrow points to the leak. This is a confirmed manufacturing problem: I communicated with another buyer who bought the same brand horn before I did. And though I bought the horn before he got a chance to reply, when he wrote, he told me he had had to return his Berkeley flugelhorn because of the same kind of leak problem. I quote: "there was a leak between the mouth pipe and the first valve casing, had to send it back." Mind you, this was a second horn that particular buyer had had to send back. The first one had a broken adjustment screw on the mouth pipe. The  mouth pipe is the flugelhorn's tuning slide.

Making the situation worse is that the seller denies there is anything wrong with the horn I sent back to him! He said he played the horn and found no problems. After I reiterated that there was no problem with sound reproduction, he gave it to three other people to play and he said they found nothing wrong with it. I sent him the above picture, pointing out that it was a leak problem. He then said it would be too expensive to send another horn and offered to refund my money. I have accepted the refund offer. It took a month and several e-mails before he refunded the money, and that only after I submitted a claim to PayPal.

Shipping, as is usual for this seller, is way too expensive--at $39.95, it is at least twice as expensive as it ought to have been. Some might consider it worse still when considering that the low starting bid auctions (say, $9.95 or $10.95) for this seller's flugelhorns have a shipping cost of $54.95! Meaning that if you win the bid for even the lowest amount, you end up paying about $64.00.

It can be difficult at times communicating in English with the seller.

The Berkeley flugelhorn is a horn that COULD HAVE BEEN a great bargain. The sound on this flugelhorn was the selling point. And if you can put up with a leak that you don't expect, then you might find this a good purchase at a low bid. However, after verifying with another buyer that the leak was a problem with him too, I do not recommend the Berkeley flugelhorn. The seller's refusal to accept that the horn was damaged is unacceptable seller conduct, as well as was the refusal to send a substitute horn and the delay in refunding my money. The Berkeley flugelhorn is, evidently, poorly manufactured and is a bad purchase. Until Berkeley addresses the manufacturing problems, it is not even worth the shipping cost.