Posted by Rick Denney on June 17, 2002 at 09:02:29:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Vintage vs. modern / thin vs. thick posted by Volker on June 15, 2002 at 04:20:21:
Yet the difference in sound between a plastic and a brass sousaphone that is otherwise similar is not dramatic. Different, yes, but not dramatic. Certainly, no non-tuba-player would be able to identify which is which without the visual cues. Maybe most tuba players would have a harder time than they'd care to admit.
Of course, when you charge $20,000 for a tuba, you had better be able to wax poetic about its subtleties. You have to figure that the basic sound of the instrument could be obtainable in a $5000 instrument, and the other $15,000 is pursuing some extremely subtle effect that perhaps only a handful of tuba players in the world could even understand or take advantage of. It is also true (and I have written about it before) that price is only indirectly related to cost, but that's another matter.
Many of the most expensive tubas are handmade. A handmade tuba must be sold for at least $12,000 to return a profit, let's say (using the Meinl-Weston 2000 as an example). So, it is a requirement that in order to sell a handmade tuba, one must promote the notion that being handmade is necessarily better. Making a tuba using machines requires building the tools, which, in turn, requires selling enough of the products to justify the cost of those tools. So, Thein may promote hand-building as the only reasonable option because automation is not a part of their business model, not because hand building is necessarily better.
Of course, execution is critical and both handmade and machine-made tubas can be poor instruments if poorly designed or constructed.
The companies that build tubas using machines must sell to the masses to amortize their machinery costs, so they design tubas to appeal to the masses, not to the handful of orchestral tubists who may be in the market for tubas in any given year.
This is a long way of saying that Thein may have many reasons for extolling the virtues of thin brass and various finishes that actually have nothing to do with real differences in the instruments (or real differences in the resulting sound). They use those methods for other reasons that make good practical sense from a builder's perspective, and then turn them into marketing advantages using hyperbole. There's nothing unusual about that, and it is our job as consumers to separate what is important from what is not.
There is also the possibility that insignificant differences become a mantra. Top professionals are susceptible to hype just like the rest of us, though perhaps it is different hype, and they may believe a bit of it. Thus believing, they approach the instrument with more confidence than they might otherwise have, and create the difference they expect. They then tell their friends and students that the horn has made this difference, when in fact they have made the difference for themselves. My suspicion is that the more one spends for a tuba, the easier it is to credit the tuba for their own improvements. I have to say that I enjoy this irony, even though I am sure that I'm also a victim of it.
If one of the best tuba players in the world, having persuaded himself that a tuba has a particular quality, expresses this to the maker, the maker will then reach deeply into his knowledge to justify and explain that effect, because it MUST be there. Sometimes, the maker reaches into myth and lore. Even the best makers don't understand everything. It thus gets repeated to the point where even skeptics will start to believe it.
Clearly, there have been improvements in instruments in the last few decades. But too many top players use instruments made 50 or more years ago to prove conclusively the value of these improvements. Of course, that the old instruments have an irreplaceable quality may also be hype, and the old brass formulations and thickness may represent a reaching for an explanation of an effect that may exist only in the player's mind.
Rick "who thinks you can have all sorts of fun bouncing around these contradictions" Denney