After visiting 4 shops and playing about 60-70 violins, I still can't seem to find my next violin 😔

Sorry for spamming the sub with violin shopping questions lately.

I'm not sure what I'm missing here, but I've been looking for a 3-5k violins in LA OC area in the past week. I've been playing on a hand me down violin <$500 and my teacher has been recommending an upgrade since last year. I wasn't ready to commit to violin as a life long hobby back then so I kept postponing this.

Last week, I finally made the plunge and started looking for my next violin. I played about a good 60-70 violins in the range. In the beginning, it was hard to know the difference among the violins and I struggled quite a bit. But now it got to a point where my ears are somewhat developed and I started rapidly eliminating instruments that I knew I couldn't love/buy.

I'm down to one last one which my teacher said was the best out of 4 I brought to him, but also mentioned as "iffy." I share the same sentiment as well. Compared to others it was good but not great.

I'm wondering if I'm beginning to look for a sound that doesn't exist in my price range. But actually it would be outlandish for me to go above 10k range since I'm like Suzuki 6 right now 😂

When I was returning some violins today, the owner, seeing me as a potential customer let me play 3 of the single Luthier made violins in-house. I didn't like 2 of them and picked the last one which was 16k🤮....when I texted my teacher about if I needed to go up on the price range, he recommended that I stick with the current price range.

I'm visiting 3 more shops this weekend, and I'm honestly wondering if I'll even find one at this rate....

My teacher recommended me to consider the worst case scenario of stopping the search for a couple months if I can't find one. Which makes sense.

I didn't think violin searching would become this difficult. Anybody wants to share their experience and a little wisdom here? I don't want this to get out of hand 😔