Posted by Gus Pratt on May 08, 2002 at 16:00:03:
In Reply to: Re: Yamaha Euph. 5th valve rotor compensator posted by Mark F. on May 07, 2002 at 19:54:12:
This disagreement has come up before. The main problem is that people are lazy and have shortened up what the manufacturers had always called "automatic compenasting system" to just "compensating". Since some people have only heard of the "laymen's" definition of "compensating" (since the automatic compensating system is the most popular) they assume it is the only type of compensating system.
I would agree that if a valve is added inline it would not make it manually compensating. However in this particular case the valve is added inside the loop of the 4th valve and the only purpose it can serve there is to adjust the tuning in the lower register. Also Yamaha brochures state that the rotor is added for "pitch 'compensation' in the lower register".
Maybe there needs to be a "laymen's" term to describe methods other then automatic compensating. I prefer the term manually compensating.