Posted by Joe S. on March 05, 2001 at 11:24:51:
I AIN'T the seller, and I certainly offer NO "guarantees" here (!!). As a matter of fact, it appears to need considerable work, and the seller titles the auction "fixer upper" (do NOT confuse this with ANOTHER "FIXER UPPER" sousaphone auction, which ends sooner).
After all of those disclaimers (above), the York sousaphone on this auction (link below) looks an awful lot like my OUTSTANDING "Pioneer" (obvious York "stencil") EEb sousaphone. My Pioneer really has a nice gruff/fat sound, a very good scale, and is amazingly flexible. When I do those "1/2 valve" octave glisses on my Pioneer, they almost sound like trombone glisses.
Anyway, it looks like it needs repairs, etc., and a LOT of sousaphones of this vintage need their pistons rebuilt (as mine did). My Pioneer (NOT the one on ebay) is an (unusually large for York sousas) approximately .690" bore instrument (about the same bore as King/Olds/Reynolds). Perhaps the seller has a way of measuring the slides on his instrument (??) to see if it has this same "large" bore (??).
Anyway it was just listed, so there is time to look into it.