Posted by Bayman on June 10, 1999 at 09:33:14:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: PT7P VS Neptune piston posted by Creedman on June 09, 1999 at 23:23:26:
Oh, c'mon creed....there were LOTS of choices 25 years ago! The only reason why it "seems" there are more today, is that the manufacturers enjoy a MUCH bigger margin (i.e. profit) than they did 25 years ago, so they promote "more choices." Lower margins meant fewer choices stateside perhaps, but the choices were always there....we just didn't think it made sense to spend what it took to get a horn at the factories...this is simply global economics. Even adjusted for inflation, the cost of a B&S-origin F tuba today street-price stateside is about THREE TIMES what it was in the mid-70's. And remember that a lot of folks back then would have thought it ludicrous to fly to yurrup, get yourself acrost the east/west border, play-test an f tuba at the factory, pay the shakedown fee to get it out of the country, and then spend another MONTH vacationing all over the continent. THAT (adjusted for inflation) is what you could do, back then, with the kind of money we pay for tubas now-a-days. Aren't the pretty catalogs nice?