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Hi Folks!
Any opinions on the hard to find MIRAPHONE 190 Bb? Thank you very much!

If you found one, I believe the next question is, from when?

Next week I might try one. Looks like an older 190 Bb model

So there's only Old, and (implicitly) Not Old? I got mine as "scratch and dent" stock around '87, so could have been made early '80s. Old, I think? But if I remember right, the bloke example above is '60s. Same old? I'm wondering if it actually has a diverse chronology like the 186 with the changing bell flares etc., just less well known because there were so few of them.

I don't have any real specific assessment from those days, really the thing at the time was that it possibly wasn't a great beginner's tuba. The current owner reportedly does good stuff with it. I'm sure it was flat in notes corresponding to the 5th partial - I more or less take that for granted since the 5th partial is indeed a flat thing, is it not? The approved mouthpiece for it at the time was the C4, though I don't know how I knew that, in the days before Tubenet.

Hello Wagtuba 23,

I played one two weeks ago. It was made in the mid 1950s and was in excellent original condition. Miraphone sold loads of them to the German and Netherland military windbands and they come up for sale quite often in Germany still.
Unlike the later versions, it featured a one piece lightweight bell and bows and what I believe to be a larger leadpipe as well.
As already noted, the D and Db in the staff were a bit flat, but most large older Miraphone BBb tubas seem to have this issue to varying degrees. The valve action is indeed somewhat stiffer than most modern tubas, but I could live with it, especially if it was upgraded with S-link Minibals.
It was otherwise a respectable Kaiser tuba but did not feel particularly special especially when compared to my Bohland&Fuchs from the 1920s and a colleague's Weltklang/B&S Kaiser from 1970.
If you do end up buying it and indeed like it, I would recommend finding a good workshop to lift the leadpipe off the bell and to port the valves. There was a customer in my workshop with one with these mods a while back, and that tuba was really something...
All the best from Berlin,
The Berliner Tuba

bloke wrote:yes...thank-you...slurring:
Venting the rotors is definitely on my list.
My instrument - just fwiw - weighs 21 lbs.
It's in one of those sleek-looking/form-fitting (1970's, obviously) Australian-crafted wood cases (with the plastic-ish tolex covering).
My hand tells me that the case weighs more than the tuba.

I meant actual porting, not just venting. In this particular case, the owner had the valves removed and the rotors were machined to increase the rotor bore from 21mm if I remember correctly, to around 22.50mm although the tubing bore stayed at 21.50mm. It was definitely money well spent as that horn was much easier to play afterwards. You can see this on most modern B&S/Melton rotary valves and many German rotary trumpets.

At the risk of hijacking this thread, can someone post a picture of a vented rotary valve (I'm very visually oriented), so I can see what the situation is? I'm curious to know if venting a rotary valve might also have the benefit of speeding up its travel a little bit, by eliminating the vacuum created.

As to porting, I tried an experiment on my last 5th valve project by ordering a valve with specs where a larger casing diameter was used than what is standard for that particular bore - (de facto scooping, I would argue), and the results were dramatic (in a good way).

Ah, now I get it - thanks.

Dare I ask, any particular reason why there are 3 holes?

bloke wrote:That, I do not believe I would not have done - regardless of the amount up confidence (up to "absolutely complete") I had in the craftmanship of the person available to do it.

Resistance is my friend...even (yes) when the resistance involves (per standard) smaller-area-than-an-instrument's defined bore-area pass-throughs (ie. "O" being choked down to "D").

It might (??) be something that (being something that ~I~ own, and not something sitting in a school locker) that ~I~ would like, or it could just as easily not. Regardless, it could not be undone, particularly as Miraphone no longer makes rotors of that bore size on the same blank.

I completely understand. I was somewhat surprised when the owner told me what was done. It's not difficult, but if something does go wrong, it's not easy to rectify. Luckily I have a colleague who is proficient at cutting new rotors if necessary, but best to avoid that if possible...

We call that work "porting" on automotive engine heads when the intake and exhaust ports are opened up to match that on the manifold or headers. In the American tuba world we usually call this "scooping" (or that is the only way I have heard or read it used over here in the past, despite its not being a very good name).

Ah understood. Some of the workshops here refer to it as "porting" but perhaps there is a better word for it. In german, one simply says "material entfernen oder ausfräsen" basically removing material.

I did this to my Miraphone 180 F tuba and it *really* helped the horn out. I also bumped the leadpipe up to a 183 Eb size relocated the main tuning slide and increased both legs to use 186 slide tubing (@ .769" ID). The horn played very well after that. It lost some of its inherent sweetness but gained so much in trade as to be a non-issue.

Porting those rotors was a very difficult and scary thing for me to attempt, and I did a mediocre job with the mediocre tools I had for the work. (A Dremel tool...!) I liked the changes so much that I nearly purchased a set of new rotors to do it again, but much more carefully and slowly.

Excellent, full respect!

Here's a video of me playing a Miraphone 190 in CC ages ago. Not sure if there are any other videos of these on youtube, so here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWCFyuSLX2c" target="_blank

It played very well, although the valves were a little sluggish compared to my Alex 163 or Meinl Weston F tuba. I rebuilt the valve linkage in instrument repair class the year before this recording was made. The bottom staff F felt really strange (stuffy?) and sounded wrong under the bell but what I perceived under the bell was not noticeable on recordings. I used a lamp oil as valve lubricant and that seemed to help with the sluggishness. As far as general intonation, I recall that it was pretty point and shoot. The low range was actually much easier than any other 6/4 sized tuba I've played. Never had any issues playing technical stuff, but I generally played F tuba 90% of the time. I only played CC tuba when I was forced to, or when I was in band/orchestra. It's a very large instrument, although it looks normal on me because I'm a pretty big guy.

We found this particular 190 in the back of the instrument storage room at Interlochen. It looked like it hadn't been played in ages. Someone posted in a thread a few years back about the history of that particular instrument. I have no idea if people are still using it- I've kind of fallen out of contact with everyone in the music world since radically changing my career path.