quiz

[windshieldbug]

This joke's been thoroughly run into the ground.

Aw, c'mon! Everyone loves a good holiday-egg hunt!

[MartyNeilan]

Aw, c'mon! Everyone loves a good holiday-egg hunt!

Did someone say hunt??

[Joe Baker]

You guys better get back to talkin' about tubers or there's gonna be black heliocopters after you!
___________________________
Joe Baker, who keeps coming back here hoping to see something interesting... *sigh*

[Chuck(G)]

The point simply being that given two similar tuba thingies with similar features but different sizes, the MAIN thing that will make one more expensive than the other is THE COST OF POLISHING (or sandblasting, etc.) THE EXTRA SURFACE AREA.

POLISHING - BY FAR - is the MOST EXPENSIVE FACTOR that goes into manufacturing any brass instrument.

You been buffing sousaphones, Joe?


I don't blame you!

[MartyNeilan]

THE COST OF POLISHING.

How much does it cost to make a tuba Polish??

[tubeast]

I can only guess as to Bloke´s objective in posting this "riddle".
Bloke, are you suggesting there will be anothjer Blokeophone in "blunt finish" available for half the price of the original Buescher Helicon cut to CC ???

(which would amount to "only" approximately one leg and a third of a man´s most important organ.... ....the liver )

[Kevin Hendrick]

THE COST OF POLISHING.

How much does it cost to make a tuba Polish??

I'll have to Czech on that ...

[Rick Denney]

The reason the price was higher for the 20K is because people were willing to pay more for them.

The cost may have been higher, too.

Rick "not confusing price and cost" Denney

[Rick Denney]

...but back in the late 1960's/early 1970's, thousands upon thousands of school bands across the United States were literally throwing their brass sousaphones in the trash in favor of brand-new fiberglass sousaphones. This is undeniable. As the fiberglass sousaphones were infinitely more popular than the brass sousaphones at that time, Conn possibly COULD HAVE charged more for the fiberglass versions than they did for the brass versions... ...but they never tried to do so.

But as I recall, one of the selling points of the plastic sousaphones was the low price. I suspect that Conn saw a market at a lower price point, and came up with using fiberglass as a way to keep costs below that price point by a large enough margin to make money on them. The "lighter weight" was probably just window dressing--my 14K is all brass and no heavier than many plastic sousaphones.

I suspect that the dreaded convertible tuba exists because of the same influence. The manufacturers were trying to find a way to market a dual-use instrument. Brass sousaphones have been priced too high for a long time because of high costs. That's an uneniable economic rality: The price must be higher than the cost. If that price is too high, the volume will go way down.

And it isn't always bad business to choose a really low price point even for a popular product. Often, a manufacturer who has really good control over costs will purposely choose a much lower price point than the market would bear just to discourage any potential competition.

Rick "not disputing that some manufacturers are better at making instruments than at the business of selling instruments" Denney

[LoyalTubist]

How much does it cost to make a tuba Polish??

The only Polish tuba player I could think of is Zdzislaw Piernik.

Maybe we should ask him!

[MichaelDenney]

Rick wrote

my 14K is all brass

Rick,
If my memory isn't failing (what am I saying, of course it's failing but it's intermittent) you had ergonomic issues with sousaphones. What has changed?

Michael "who could have used a couple additional sousaphone bits to prevent cricks in the neck" Denney