My Review of the Instruments Zen Store

Have you recently discovered an online musical instrument store called Instruments Zen? Are you considering placing an order on this site? Can you trust this retailer, or is it a scam? Are there any reviews of the Instruments Zen store?

After considering placing an order on this website myself, I did some research to determine whether this business was legitimate. As a result, I can share everything I discovered about Instruments Zen’s sales practices and the people behind the company.

Instruments Zen is an online store that sells instruments designed for music therapy. Its owner appears to be deliberately trying to remain anonymous while failing to comply with legal requirements. Finally, the reviews posted on this site are fake.

Once you’ve read this entire article, you’ll know:

• Who is behind Instruments Zen
• Whether any genuine reviews have been posted about this store
• My honest personal opinion of this online business

You’ll then have all the information you need to decide whether you can trust Instruments Zen and place an order on its website.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the owner of the Instruments Zen store.

Who Is Behind the Instruments Zen Store?

Instruments Zen is an online store that, as its name suggests, primarily sells musical instruments associated with relaxation and calm. For example, it offers handpans, kalimbas, and therapeutic tuning forks. I wanted to purchase one of the tuning forks to see whether it would work for me.

The first crucial step when considering a purchase from a website is to check whether its legal notices are present and complete. These notices are required by law and must include specific information so that consumers can clearly identify the website owner if a problem arises. They must be accessible from every page of the online store and are therefore generally located in the footer. This is the case on the Instruments Zen website, and here is what appears at the very beginning of its legal notices:

I then learned that the Instruments Zen store is operated by STUDIO45NORD. The rest of the text concerns the terms of use, and at the very end, as though the writer wanted to hide it, some additional information appears:

It states that STUDIO45NORD is supposedly located in Canada at 281 RUE JEANNE ROBERT, J2W2P1 Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, QC, CA. A French phone number and an email address are also listed. The first problem is that French and European law require much more information to appear on this page. Specifically, the law requires all of the following:

• The company’s registration number in the Trade and Companies Register (RCS)
• Its VAT registration number
• The first and last name of the person responsible for publishing the site

Absolutely none of this essential information appears on the legal notice page, even though this violation is punishable by one year in prison and a €75,000 fine. It seems surprising that a legitimate business could unintentionally omit so much crucial information, so this caught my attention. I therefore searched the official registry of businesses registered in Quebec.

There is indeed a company registered in Quebec under the name STUDIO 45NORD, registration number 2279417424, since January 8, 2024. However, the listed address is not actually the same as the one given in the Instruments Zen store’s legal notices. Instead of 281 RUE JEANNE ROBERT, STUDIO 45NORD’s actual address is 3-281 RUE JEANNE ROBERT. The number “3” before the street address simply indicates that the company is located in apartment No. 3 at what appears to be a residential property.

The official Quebec website also states that it is a sole proprietorship owned by Hugo Davaud whose primary activity is “film and video production.” This is very surprising because there is no mention whatsoever of any retail activity. It also states that the company has no employees, which is equally surprising given that Instruments Zen refers to its “teams” in its shipping policy. To earn my trust, it would have been helpful to explain who these teams actually are within a sole proprietorship that has no employees.

So, what is the connection between a video production sole proprietorship and a musical instrument store? I have absolutely no idea. There used to be a website, https://studio45nord.com/, showcasing this company’s video production work, but it is now offline, which is not very reassuring either. However, a few images can still be found confirming that this sole proprietorship was indeed focused on video production:

Finally, a closer look at the www.instruments-zen.fr domain name shows that it was created on December 23, 2024, and that its owner chose to remain anonymous when registering it:

I genuinely feel that the owner of instruments-zen.fr has done everything possible to minimize the amount of information available on the store, in complete disregard of the law and consumers. I should obviously not have to conduct all this research merely to identify the owner of an online store. Even after doing so, I still do not know whether Hugo Davaud is truly the owner or whether this is a case of identity theft connected to a scam, since there is no link between online retail and video production. In any event, this store is not complying with the law.

Are There Any Reviews of This Online Music Store?

According to the Instruments Zen website, the store has more than 200 reviews and a rating of 4.8 out of 5.

However, more than 100 of these reviews are dated before December 23, 2024, even though the site did not exist before that date! For example, here is an entire series of reviews from September 2024, three months before the store was created:

How can this be explained? It is simply impossible. In my opinion, these are fake reviews intended to mislead prospective customers about the legitimacy of this online business. Reviews containing photos may also have been taken from other businesses, which is illegal as well. Furthermore, the top two reviews were posted on the same day by the same person, identified as R. R., for the same item, yet they contain different text, which is troubling. Posting fake reviews online or altering genuine reviews is considered an unfair commercial practice. Businesses that violate this provision face two years in prison and a €300,000 fine, and that appears to be the case here. Extreme caution is therefore warranted.

Furthermore, there are no external reviews of this store apart from a single review on Trustpilot. It comes from a Canada-based profile that has posted only one review in its entire history, and Canada is STUDIO 45NORD’s supposed location. It is therefore possible that the store owner submitted this sole review. Finally, the rate at which reviews appear on the Instruments Zen store is completely inconsistent. For example, dozens of reviews were posted in January 2025, sometimes several in a single day. Yet no new reviews have appeared since May 14, 2025, even though I am writing this article in July 2025. This remains extremely strange.

What Is My Opinion of This Relaxation and Music Therapy Instrument Store?

I could not find all the information I needed to place an order on this site. In particular, the return and refund policy did not provide a return address in case I wanted to exercise my statutory right to withdraw from the purchase. It simply states that customers must send an email. Potential customers would certainly want this information because the terms state that customers must pay the return shipping costs and that the product might have to be shipped to Canada, resulting in extremely high additional costs.

Furthermore, when I visited the Instruments Zen store, the consumer mediator was not identified in the terms of use either. Yet this is a legal requirement for all online retailers and is intended to protect consumers. Failure to comply with this law exposes businesses to a substantial fine, but this does not appear to concern the owner of Instruments Zen.

Finally, and this is almost a minor detail after everything else, many pages on this store appear to have been produced using artificial intelligence. This is particularly true of the description for the tuning fork I wanted to buy, but the same also appears to apply to many other product pages and blog articles (I made the same observation in my review of the Vibrations Positives store). The writing seemed bland and devoid of any human touch, so I decided to investigate. The problem is that many e-commerce sites have recently emerged with the help of artificial intelligence because it can generate text almost instantly. Some of these sites turn out to be mass-produced scams that never deliver their customers’ orders, although it is impossible to make any such definitive claim about Instruments Zen.

Therefore, my opinion of Instruments Zen remains very negative. I was unable to order a therapeutic tuning fork, so I can base my assessment only on the factual information presented above.

Choose a Trusted, Fully Identified Professional for Your Future Musical Instruments

Businesses specializing in music therapy or sound therapy are relatively rare, whether they operate physical stores or sell online. It can therefore be tempting to choose one of the first offers you find, such as those from Instruments Zen. However, it is important to check beforehand that all legal guarantees are properly honored, which is clearly not the case with this store. Therefore, you should remain cautious.

However, if you are looking for a reliable partner, consider a company that is 100% transparent about its operations. That is why I recommend Instruments du Monde, a store that complies with all applicable legal requirements while offering high-quality products. It provides all the assurance you need to establish a genuine relationship of trust.

Discover all the products offered by Instruments du Monde by clicking the image below:

The collectionChoose from more than 200 Tibetan singing bowls to find the one that’s right for you4.6/5 · 500+ reviewsView the Wide Selection of Tibetan Singing Bowls

One more helpful detail: in another article, I compiled all the most calming and relaxing instruments so you can choose the one you feel a connection with. A video of each instrument is included to help you decide.