Philosophical thoughts on "clones"

[quesonegro]

Like I said, you choose...

[Donn]

Might be interesting to explore what "I can afford" has meant over the years, and what it means when we're talking about a tuba vs. another musical instrument, or another kind of purchase. I have a hunch that when you have the option to pay half as much for something, then rather suddenly you can afford to pay only half as much. 80 years ago, say, when here in the US I guess we'd all be playing US made tubas, what did we pay for them, as a fraction of a year's wages, and how much would that be today?

One basic problem with this phenomenon is that pretty soon we can afford to support production of anything only in other parts of the world, and the only thing we have to offer is a dwindling supply of raw materials.

[quesonegro]

I think Donn is making an excellent point!

[quesonegro]

I don't deny that there are people who can't truly afford to buy a tuba, but in many cases, displayed in the comments on this forum for instance, that does not really seem to be the case. There are other parameters at work than simply lack of funds. We all have to make our own choices and I don't claim to walk in anybody else's shoes, I simply suggest that there's more to the cost of things than what's on the price tag...

[Three Valves]

Might be interesting to explore what "I can afford" has meant over the years, and what it means when we're talking about a tuba vs. another musical instrument, or another kind of purchase. I have a hunch that when you have the option to pay half as much for something, then rather suddenly you can afford to pay only half as much. 80 years ago, say, when here in the US I guess we'd all be playing US made tubas,

And I have a hunch fewer than half of us would have the money, free time or inclination to play at all.

At least we wouldn't be wasting time on the computer or TV!!

[Donn]

And I have a hunch fewer than half of us would have the money, free time or inclination to play at all.

Maybe, sure. People with a kind of half hearted commitment could be out of the game. Personally, the closest I've ever come to buying a new tuba was a scratch-and-dent BBb 190, about 30 years ago. That's what I do to limit the financial burden of my half-hearted commitment to playing, I buy used.

[happyroman]

In my garage I have a Mustang with a six-cylinder 307 HP engine that gets 30 mpg on the high, comes with a six year warranty, and is safer than any car made 15 years ago. For $19k. If Hyundai was not down I-85 one way, and Kia not up I-85 the other way, do you think Ford would have been pushed to make such an outstanding product? Competition is what drives capitalism.

First of all, I am glad that you have your Wessex, because otherwise, you might not be able to own a tuba at all. This is a good thing.

On the other hand, your discussion regarding competition is comparing apples to oranges. Hyundai and Kia are not cloning Mustangs (or any other automobile models). Insteade, they are manufacturing their own designs. The resulting competition forces everybody to make better cars and we all benefit from that.

If I can build a better mousetrap, then I should benefit in the market. My concern is when someone else copies my mousetrap design in order to undercut my prices, and potentially, take away my business.

[Three Valves]

I'm interested to know how my not being able to afford a tuba makes life better for Franz in the Black Forest or Bobby in Elkhart.

Obviously you should buy a used one!!

[Worth]

Solution: Import tariffs which would make purchase of non U.S. goods prohibitively expensive. As an owner of three British Euphoniums and two Chinese Tubas this would certainly have affected my decision. With this policy in place there would also have been more acceptable quality U.S. made instrument choices available. I'm obviously not schooled in the impact of such a policy on world economics but can you imagine the positive impact on American manufacturing?

[pjv]

Possibly one of the issues clouding this discussion is modernization.
In 1921 copying a tuba may probably meant a manufacturer buying the competitions instrument and measuring it as well as they sought fit. Most every manufacturer has done this in some shape or form. (A friend of mine back in the 70's got a mint condition Bach Mt. Vernon 36 trombone from his dad who worked at Miraphone. The thing had been lying around for years after Miraphone was finished with it for measuring).
Nowadays the technological advances allow amazing copies to be made. And sometimes these copies are a bit better then the originals (depending on who you ask I guess). Point is; this is the history of the world. It's always been like this. Who can say if the worlds second stone knife was or was not a copy of the first stone knife....and manufactured by THE COMPETITION!
By the way, not only do we copy objects, but playing styles and compositions as well. And maybe you loose a job because another guy who copies your style is also cheeper. And that's business. It's always been this way.

[tofu]

Here http://elginwatches.org/history/short_history.html is an interesting history of watches. Before 1850 the English and Swiss ruled. But after 1850 until really just before the turn of the century 1900 - Americans ruled. The article doesn't mention it, but what pushed American watch makers to build high precision and affordable watches was the railroads. Railroads in the age of limited communication were dependent on precision time keeping for safe running. Watches were tested for accuracy every day & if your watch failed the test you would lose your job. What's interesting is the Swiss figured out how to come back and compete (with some help of WWI and II) and they owned the market once again. When the Japanese took the watch market by storm in the '70's with quartz timepieces everybody wrote off the swiss again, but they staged another comeback. When smartphones came on the scene a decade ago people started to stop wearing a watch and folks started to write off the swiss again. We will see if they can comeback once again.

Continual improvement & innovation in product and efficiency in manufacturing have been largely absent in tuba manufacturers. Perhaps it is a product that due to low volume demand combined with limited ways to automate a highly labor intensive manufactory process to build consistent high quality instruments will always mean production will move to places with the lowest labor cost. The history of watch making does show that with innovation and efficiency a country can regain dominancy in an industry it once dominated.

Tariffs aren't the answer. If your domestic market is protected companies become lazy - innovation takes a big hit and so does efficiency since you can just ratchet up the price (assuming you have a product with some price elasticity). Before the importation of Japanese cars in the '80's American manufactures just kept ramping up the price of autos. Auto inflation was way above other inflation measures and the cars were delivered with poor fit and finish. The average number of defects per car was in the 40's -now that number is low single digits. Domestic manufacturers said people wouldn't pay/didn't want better quality - Honda/Toyota/Datsun(Nissan) proved them wrong. Now domestic manufacturers are building competitive cars in both price and quality. That wouldn't have happened with tariffs.

[Art Hovey]

I have nothing against "cloning" tubas. I just wish they would pick some better instruments to clone.
(I know that some progress is being made in that direction, and I also applaud the work of guys like Dick Barth and Matt Walters who are actually coming up with new designs that make sense, but why are we still seeing copies of ancient designs that never were comfortable to play?)

[quesonegro]

I play a Haag cimbasso. Franz Monschau who builds them has put a tremendous amount of time and effort into developing it and he is still thinking of ways to make it better, trying new solutions...
Each instrument is built by him, by hand and it takes him a lot of time to build and finish each horn.
This process is not a consequence of "lack of modernisation", it's how he chooses to do things and it reflects on his work and the quality of his instruments...

[Three Valves]

If I can build a better mousetrap, then I should benefit in the market. My concern is when someone else copies my mousetrap design in order to undercut my prices, and potentially, take away my business.

Like an Ophicleide or Tornister tuba for instance??

[PMeuph]

I don't get it...

I've owned 7 tubas, and only 1 has been more expensive to purchase than a clone....(My Boosey EEb)

That is.....Unless you consider "New and Shiny" to be more important than "Used and Affordable."

_______

As for clones per se. As a euphonium player, all horns are basically "clones." Yamaha, Willson, Hirshbrunner, Adams, Sterling, Jinbao.. etc are basically all clones of the Besson/B&H. (or a Clone of a Clone)

[Ricko]

^^^ Bingo! Spot on!

[Donn]

Money and stuff ... yes, it's complicated, to the extent that I think an "explanation" that makes any sense to most of us is probably BS. And guns and bombs or whatever, it's probably true that we all (world-wide) can be expected to make it work because the alternative is not pleasant.

The global long term outlook, like several generations down the road, will have more to do with real things. Food, water, that kind of real. The Chinese are paying a terrible price there, too, but we aren't in any position to laugh.

What this has to do with tubas, I'm not sure.

[Donn]

Well ... re mention on the same page, of tariffs and below-cost exports of manufactured goods ... there have been plenty of cases of export dumping, as a form of predatory pricing. If this applies to Chinese tubas, then I guess it would probably be incidentally. I mean, as opposed to any specific plan to drive US, Brazilian, German etc. tuba manufacturers out of the market, we'd be looking at a general effect of suppressing competing industrial production in general - but it doesn't make any difference, specific or general, intentional or by accident, if the effect is the same. The expectation would be that after the side with the deepest reserves has starved out the others, prices will go up to cover the victor's expenses.

We didn't impose tariffs on the auto industry, but we did have a tariff on the largest Japanese motorcycles, to protect Harley Davidson, after accusations of dumping. Lasted 5 years or so, until Harley was doing so well they declined further tariff protection - undoubtedly due to a variety of unrelated turn-arounds, and there's some question as to whether the Japanese were much competition anyway in HD's overweight class, but anyway it sure gave the appearance of a successful intervention in response to predatory pricing. In contrast to theoretical predictions that protection will harm an industry.

[Donn]

It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict increasing Chinese factory wages - I believe they approximately quadrupled between 2000 and 2010, and the rate of increase looks geometrical. They're bringing in illegal undocumented workers from south of the border, in their case SE Asia, to ease the pain.

When they can't use lower labor costs to undercut 1st world production, they'll still have infrastructure advantages - so much industry has moved there, that the parts and technology you need to make something is likely gone. But it will move on to cheaper lands. They should still be able to make tubas, though, eh? I guess the question might be, will they want to? Is there an HN White in China, whose heirs will go on to keep a musical tradition alive, because cloning Miraphones is in their blood?

[toobagrowl]

Much of Yamaha's stuff - as an example - is now made in China...but this is not:
http://www.thecrownstore.com/ycb-826s-y ... el-cc-tuba

Except for the "student" line, I'm willing to bet most of Yamaha's other stuff is made/assembled in Japan.