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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Good heavens, $2800 for a bent piece of pipe! [1] That sounds like a market ripe for disruption.

[1] https://www.flutespecialists.com/product/flute-lab-vertical-...

As I commented elsewhere, the headjoint of a flute significantly affects the sound quality and timbre, and spending $2800 on a headjoint (even a standard one) is expensive, but still well within the reasonable price range of a more standard-shaped good quality headjoint.

If you want a cheap flute you can easily find one for under $200, or cheaper used. With nice instruments, this is a lot like looking at high end furniture and saying, "I could make a table so much more cheaply."

Yes, you could. But you're not going to attract the same buyers.

I think, in this case, it's more akin to a shipwright of wooden galleons saying they could make a table more cheaply than the guy who only makes tables for a living could; or a medieval military swordsmith saying they could make kitchen knives more cheaply than the guy who only makes kitchen knives for a living could. I.e. someone who does all the same work that these niche "artisans" do, with usually even higher quality (because of actual commercial requirements and engineering tolerances being involved), often in 1/10th the time, repeatably at scale, as just one aspect of much larger projects.

Similarly, in this case, I bet any boilermaker (or steam turbine engineer) could make a better flute mouthpiece than an instrument-maker could. At scale, for cheap. They're pipe fittings, with mouth gaskets!

> They're pipe fittings

Sort of. With most pipe we don't care that much about the exact paths the fluid or gas takes because it's for moving things and not making sound. Small choices that would be completely irrelevant in building an industrial boiler would still have clear effects on the sound of a flute.

So people are paying for the brand name.

No, there's a real difference between my $200 Armstrong beginner's flute and my $2,000 [1] Miyazawa intermediate flute in terms of result (sound), materials (nickel vs silver), and process (factory vs artisan). (To a point, of course: a good flutist will still sound better on the Armstrong than a bad flutist will on the Miyazawa.)

[1] price when I bought it. More now. Musical instruments appreciate, unlike electronics.

Indeed, the tone quality from a solid silver Sankyo flute is absolutely distinguishable from the tone of a nickel Armstrong. I’m not sure that I buy the arguments for, say, gold lip plates, but there is an audible difference between silver and nickel.

> the tone quality from a solid silver Sankyo flute is absolutely distinguishable from the tone of a nickel Armstrong

Different, sure. But better? Two orders of magnitude better? Seems improbable to me.

We're talking about aesthetics and art.

How do you quantify a unit of "better"? And perhaps more importantly, how many musicians agree with you?

If you want to fall back to economic evidence, centuries of musicians appear to have wallet-voted the other way.

Sure, but some people pay $30,000 for a bottle of Chateau Petrus too. Personally, I think they're crazy.

But it's not the existence of the high end that I'm remarking on, it's the apparent lack of low-end competition. Where is the two-buck chuck of vertical flute adapters?

Here's someone playing with making their own: https://www.nyfluteclub.org/uploads/2020-2021/FluteFair-2021...

One dollar to make the bends, 2799 for knowing where to make the bends.

It sounds like a very small market that only one company has bothered to enter.

to be clear, that's $2800 just for the "vertical adapter" bit. Flute not included!

Yes, exactly. If that were the price for the whole flute that might make sense. But just the adapter? That is just ridiculous. It's the monster cable of musical accessories.

The headjoint of a flute is a key part which significantly affects the sound quality and timbre of the instrument - it is by no means an “adapter” to the rest of the instrument. It is common in fact to buy flutes in separate pieces, with the body by one manufacturer and the headjoint by another. And $2000 for the headjoint and $4000 for the body (Australian dollars) would be a pretty standard price for a good-quality student flute which would see someone through a performance diploma.

you schooled me. thanks!

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