Posted by Rick Denney on October 10, 2002 at 21:33:53:
In Reply to: YBB641 ? posted by De on October 10, 2002 at 20:18:10:
There's hardly a horn made that doesn't have its fan club, even if that club is tiny. What club will find you as a member? Only you can tell.
No tuba is worth the money if it doesn't play well. There are remarkably inexpensive, used tubas that play well enough to preclude from consideration altogether those that don't. A tuba you don't like to play is worse that worthless--you should have to be paid to endure it. But that doesn't mean the 641 that you play will be bad, or that it will be bad for you. Based on reports, the odds aren't in your favor.
A 321 has other problems, to my thinking mostly ergonomic. It isn't tuba that plays that badly, but it is hard to hold and it attracts dents aggressively. I know a fellow who has a new one, and he was surprised to discover two dents in the bottom bow resulting only from resting it on a hard chair. And the cost of a new one is as high as tubas that most would consider to be more worthy, including a Jupiter 582, a VMI 2301, or a used nearly anything. And Weril has apparently done a reasonable copy of a 321 form much less money than any of these, if that's the sort of your you want.
Yamaha took its designs from a variety of sources. Those instruments that are based on successful designs (such as, for example, the 621 series, the discontinued 661 CC tuba, and so on) are good tubas and reasonably consistent. Those that are based on poor designs, including the 641, and to a lesser extent the 321, seem to come from a different planet. Yamaha doesn't have the family resemblance running across its product line the way many tuba manufacturers do.
Rick "who would take a used Miraphone in a heartbeat" Denney