I bought my curved Academy soprano around two months ago - After much playing I can report - The construction is good and strong, keywork is pretty stiff; finish is good. The blowing is very easy indeed, but the intonation is not good - it goes flat below bottom D..... over a semitone flat on bottom C# and bottom C and it improved things a bit...... it's now only a semitone flat ! I get around this by simply playing D when I want to hear C#, C# when I want to hear C, and so on !
The middle octave, as you ascend, begins to go sharp. It's easy to "blow down" to the correct pitch as the sharpness isn't too bad, and the embouchure is correspondingly eased too because of this.
The intonation is the only thing that lets this horn down. Maybe a professional set-up would largely alleviate these problems, but I can live with them and it would probably cost at least half of what I paid for the thing anyway. By the way, the tone is fat and warm, unlike the half-dozen sporanos I've owned in the past, some of them much dearer than this one, and the bottom bell tones are actually in tune and fat and full in tone.
The case is crap - it's a semi-soft zip case. When I received it, the case had been subjected to being buried under other mail and had bent the LH pinkie keys out of true, which took all of ten seconds to rectify, but the case definately lets the instrument down as it doesn't protect it like it should.
Richard