[Helen]

Thanks guys for all your input! I will pass this stuff on.

FYI, she took the horns to Mark at USA Horns last week. She knows this will be a process, and is expecting to have to go to a few different shops before she makes a final decision.
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As for the future of the vintage horn market.... Personally, I don't worry about it, since I don't buy horns as investments. I buy my horns to play. There are lots of good deals out there if you know where to look, and if you're patient.

As for the cheap, Asian horns available for less than an overhaul, in all seriousness, I'm not sure they factor in to the equation. It's like comparing apples to oranges.

The fact is, vintage horns are not really a good choice for beginning students anyways. As much as I love my vintage horns, I recognize that my students are better served by learning the fundamentals on a modern horn.

However, after a couple of years of playing the cheap junk being passed off as student horns today--if the student hasn't quit by then out of sheer frustration, which is why we as instructors owe it to our students to help them pick as decent a horn as possible out of today's crappy offerings--then the student is ready for an upgrade. At that point, a vintage pro horn could be a viable option for them if it is in decent condition.

Even factoring in an overhaul, or a re-padding, it will likely still be less than a new "intermediate model" that can be just as sketchy as the student models. Again, this is where as instructors, we should be helping our students find and pick out a horn.

That said, there are lots of vintage horns that will likely fall into disuse, and potentially get re-purposed or recycled as younger players fall into the trap thinking that newer means it's always better.

Now to totally derail my own thready completely, here's a link to an article I recently wrote us not being the owners, but more the caretakers of great saxophones.

This article follows my thinking above to its natural conclusion.

Thanks for entertaining my stream of conscious writing. Hey, at least I only hijacked my own thread. :mrgreen: