Posted by Jay Bertolet on July 09, 2002 at 17:54:20:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: York tubas posted by Mark on July 09, 2002 at 17:01:13:
That's a very interesting viewpoint!
I'm a little reluctant to believe that others could come along today and make copies of the CSO Yorks with any greater precision than those that have attempted it already. While I'm no expert on the process nor privy to any information about the budgets involved in the development of the current crop of copies, I trust the integrity of the manufacturers that have tried to copy those horns. I believe that they made every effort to faithfully reproduce those horns as accurately as possible. I also believe that they did this at least partially in self defense. Coming as close as possible in the reproduction certainly would yield the best chance of attaining the same playing characteristics.
I never considered the possibility of how the two existing CSO Yorks would compare to a production of, say, 100 horns. You're thinking is quite right and I was foolish not to consider that aspect of the equation. What's to say that those two horns were the best horns York ever produced? Certainly, every step was taken to make these horns as mistake free as possible, considering for whom they were made. Combined with a good design and really high attention to detail and assembly, these horns may be the finest representation of York's work. The other 98 horns, produced under different circumstances and for different reasons, may not have measured up.
In any event, I'm thinking that your ideas are quite solid. The actual construction of these two horns must play a major role in the outcome. My thinking was from the opposite end. I'm speculating that the "genius that went into the design" would be at least partially discernable from the tools of the maker. That tooling might give insights into the design process that produced these instruments. I know next to nothing about York's craftsmen (including a Mr. Johnson, I believe) but these guys didn't work in a vacuum. They used tools to produce instruments and those tools might give a great deal of insight into the thought processes behind those designs. Maybe the real jackpot at the end of the search for that tooling would be knowledge that, when combined with what we currently know about acoustics, could produce some even better instruments.
Of course, this is all just wild speculation. I can't seem to get past the example of the Stradivarius. They've been making violins more than three times as long as tubas and still, nobody has produced a violin approaching the level of the Stradivarius which was produced around 300 years ago. Every time I think I understand the process, I remember that fact and I re-examine just how much random chance plays into this whole equation.
My opinion for what it's worth...