Posted by Kenneth Sloan on March 02, 2004 at 17:31:07:
"Play before you buy" is the standard advice.
OK - you find yourself with $x,000 in your pocket and you are in the middle of a tuba showroom with every tuba you've ever heard of. You only have the one afternoon, which works out to perhaps 5 minutes with each tuba (for the first round - you can spend more time with the winners after triage).
What do you play? What do you listen for? How do you eliminate the obvious lowers and select winners to look at more closely.
And then what? How do you approach the short list of winners? How do you get from "those 5 are acceptable" to "that's the one - wrap it up"?