Insurance - your experiences

I wondered about this in the past myself. I told my insurance agent what I had and asked if they needed a detailed list or photos and he told me, "Nope, if it's in your home it's covered".  I take him at his word since he owns the Agency.

Your policy should have an "exclusions" section.  They are sometimes a little on the dense side, but I should pretty clearly lay out what is not covered. But that is only step 1.  Even if your recordings are definitely covered, there could still be a large dispute as to what the value of the recordings are.  

Cleeds hit it on the money. You have to have specifically "replacement cost" insurance. What it costs now to replace the unit with a like unit. If you have just standard insurance they will cover the price of your equipment minus depreciation. If you paid say $5000 for a preamp ten years ago a "like" preamp today would cost $8000 which is what you would get with replacement cost insurance. With regular insurance you might get $3000. 
My Krell Ref 2 preamp got struck by lightening in 1996. I paid $4000 for it in around 1983. I gave the insurance company examples of like preamps and they gave me $11,000! 

In order to get records covered you have to have a list of every record you have. It helps to take a picture of the collection. Also take pictures of all your equipment. if you have replacement cost insurance they will pay for whatever it costs to replace those records with the same titles. If the records can not be replaced because they are out of print you get nothing.

I agree, with testpilot. :-)