Question to the long-time Wessex owners

[matt g]

@bort2.0, those old St. Petersburg tubas from either “die tuba” or Tuba Exchange from that period (1993 to 1998 or so) all had terrible valves. Yes, you could upgrade the linkages, springs, paddles, etc. to better stuff, but none of that fixed the problem of the rotors not being airtight.

I must defend my St-Pete here. I have one with the german machine and they are good. Not as nice as that of my 191 but they are also not as nice as the ones on an BandS I used to have.
But the soldering is excellent and the slides fit better than on my 191.

I was specifically talking about the ones with Russian/Ukrainian valves. Agreed that if the valves were swapped for German made ones, the main problem with that tuba went away.