When I first started, I played on an old plastic Buecher. Then I borrowed my college's F. Loreé AK... WOW! It was like going from grape juice to a vintage red wine from France. Played like a dream and my tone improved 100 times over.
An elderly oboe maker from my city (Trento - Italy) told me that the price was very high due to the woodworking. The internal hole, in fact, is conical unlike other instruments such as the clarinet, in which it is cylindrical. For this reason the milling must be done progressively waiting for the wood to season, to avoid cracks and to finish the instrument it takes a few years. :-)
Excellent overview. I always found it interesting that Americans usually prefer the Loree oboes, but all over Europe and much of Asia we tend to prefer the Marigaux. Thank you for this very interesting video.
Howarth is becoming more popular than Loree in many places. Rigoutat has been more popular in Europe than Loree for a while. Yamaha is actually becoming quite popular. Loree is going out of style; as they should. They're oboes are too mass produced. I wouldn't want a new Loree.
My fiberglass Selmer Signet oboe cost my folks $850 at Chuck Levin's back in 1978. It revolutionized my tone after a year playing on an awful rental Linton oboe.
Does anyone have any idea why the bell of the oboe is sphere-shaped instead of hyperbolic? Is that why it sounds so muffled, compared to other woodwinds and in particular most folk double reed instruments?
Wrong. Oboes are expensive because people keep paying high prices for them, which drives the cost up. I play the oboe and it sickens me how much it costs.
But you also have to consider that the saxophone is metal, while good oboes have many years of maturing to do before they can even cut them. Also, you have to consider demand. There are way more saxophones both in production and in the market because it is a more commonly played instrument as well as way more forgiving in small manufacturing errors. If they mess up a sax, they can melt it down and start over, though I suspect most of it is machined so probably unlikely. If an oboe warps or cracks, or they drilled a hole wrong, they have to start over with a whole new blank. Howarth only makes about 800 per year, of which only 200 are professional. When you take into account how few manufacturers there are, how long it takes to make, the rarity of the wood, the hours/days of fine tuning, then it is unsurprising that the cost is so high. Unfortunate, but that is the cost of playing the oboe. If you want a cheaper instrument, choose something else. One guitar maker can make 20,000 in a week, while it is estimated that that is how many oboes are made in a year worldwide.
Of course cheap is subjective, especially when considering the amount of $1500. The oboe, like most of its woodwind brethren (bassoon, clarinets, etc.), is a precision instrument the relies on technicians for precise adjustments which cannot be automated.
