Air leaks, how do they effect your playing?

[Dan Schultz]

NUP! No difference.

That's interesting, perhaps your water key is tiny ? On my Alex if I hold the water key open the over all sound of the entire instrument basically shrinks.

Or maybe there's a HORRIBLE leak somewhere else!

[PaulMaybery]

To answer that question Joe, it does drain, I even examined and cleaned the Saturn, blew through it on a pressure test and it does function. There is no blockage. The Saturn engineering involves a small ss ball sitting over the drill hole. When articulated, it is raised a bit to allow water to drain, but I noticed that to be only 2 or 3 mm, which does not seem to be enough to interfere with the resonance of the horn as would a wide open standard water key. The Saturn WK came on the tuba as it was customized by the owner previous to me. I would not install them in the future. While in theory they are a cool invention, probably acoustically a tiny bit better than a standard key, on my tuba at least they drain entirely too slowly. It is positioned directly over the original hole and lines up just fine. Perhaps Saturn might look into creating a larger version for tuba to accommodate more condensation.
But we have two issues going on here in this thread (leakage and water key issues) and I apologize for the digression.