I have been and I still am a critic of the whole vibratosax thing but I know that their production cost is and has to be higher than any Chinese made “ traditional” saxophone even being produced in Thailand, because if the labour costs are not higher than Taiwan or China, the injection molding start up cost, the polycarbonate and all the engineering costs are very high and would be very high anywhere in the world.
Their naivety was to think that they could make and sell this for 200$ (this was the original intention), which might have been the case in terms of production costs but didn’t include all the other costs which make a business ( and of course not only their costs but also the ones of their importers and distributors!)
In the end Vibratosax suffers of the same problems that affected the Grafton, which started its life wanting to be a very cheap saxophone but wasn’t able to deliver a saxophone, at the time, able to compete on price ( and image!) with other cheaper saxophones made in Italy, Bohemia, East Germany or Romania, which were, at the time, the equivalent of Taiwanese, Chinese and Vietnamese saxophones.
So Grafton was complex to make, costed more to make than a brass saxophone, was difficult to repair and never met the favor of the large public.
If Parker, Coleman, Bowie and others wouldn’t have played it we would only consider it a curiosity and an oddity.
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, although, perhaps I could use as exculpatory evidence the remnants of a past but not forgotten English education.
