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It's similar to the Marzan tubas from the 1970s and 1980s:



You can see a picture of Fred Marzan here with Bill Bell and two of his Fred's fellow graduate students at Indiana University in 1963. Doesn't his tuba look a little familiar?

Since I live in Vietnam, I haven't really been interested in this, but many of the items of his estate have been going up for sale on eBay in recent months.

I played one of these recently at Dillon's. I liked it very much although I'm partial to big, dark sounding horns like this. The valve action was amazingly good and intonation was great, as is usual for Mirafones.

So what is the significance of the "2" at the beginning of the model number in the Miraphone line? I know a two following a 1, as in 1291, signifies piston valves.

Eric "Miraphone fan" L.

I think the 1290 replaced it, which was briefly superceded by the 1295, then the popular 1291 and now the tweaked 1292.

The Miraphone 289 is the upgrade of the 189. Which was, I believe, Miraphones follow up to the 190 Kaiser, to make it more ergonomic. This model came out in the late '90's I think.

The more I look at them, the less they look alike. Bell taper different, differences in wrap, slide configuration, etc. Different horns.

To answer my own question above, the 2 prefix seems reserved for the oddballs they don't sell many of.

Eric "thinking there are more differences than similarities" L.

I saw one of these in use last year at NABBA, I believe with the Atlantic Brass Band (though I'm not 100% sure). They switched some players between numbers, and a bearded gent came in with one of these horns. They had used 3 Eb + 2BBb for the first tune and switched to 2 Eb + 3BBb for the second. Adding this horn and player really increased the depth of the BBb sound, too.

The 191 is short and pretty compact, but the 289 is a big, tall horn. The bell is about an inch wider than most of the other BBb Miraphones, too, so comparing the sizes of the horns relative to the bells shows how much taller it is. This is a typical Marzan-style valve section, too, with slanted rotors, a shorter leadpipe, and most of the valve tubing in the same direction. The 1st and 3rd valve slides are easily accessible from the top.

I don't think that there's any ancestry of the 191 in the 289. They're just way too different. This is more like a Marzanized 187.

Edit: Oops! The 191 and 289 have the same bell width, 470 mm (18.5"). Even so, the bell looks larger in the picture of the 191, and expanding the picture of the 289 till it's the same width as the 191 shows how much taller it is.

I superimposed pictures of the two horns after matching the bell widths. Sorry, I'm no Photoshop expert.



You can easily see the difference in heights of the horns.