Posted by Aaron Lowe (170.253.172.1) on May 22, 2000 at 16:51:22:
In Reply to: Re: Lee Oskar or Huang? posted by Tuten on May 16, 2000 at 15:55:37:
: Let me tell you a story about huang harps.
: Once I met a guy who told me that he's bought a Huang(and Huang makes relatively inexpensives harps), and got to playing it. One day,he pulled
: a draw note and felt something sharp hit im in the back of his throat. For weeks his throat was raw and he kept hawking up blood. He went to a doctor and the doctor couldn't make out what was wrong right away. He figured it out himself when he went to pull that same draw note and heard nothing. When he opened the harp to see what the problem was, he discovered that the reed had broken off and that apparently he'd sucked it down his throat, where like a dagger, it'd been imbedded.
: My advice to you is to run from Huangs like you'd run from the plague!...
: Tuten
I'm sorry Tuten has had (and heard) such bad experiences concerning the Huang harmonicas. Personally, I own 3 Silvertone Deluxes in various keys and find them to be an excellent value for their cost ($7.50 at Farrells). I have one that is my favorite harp I own. Granted, Huang could stand to be more consistent with the quality of their harps (some are great, some just OK), but like I said I find them to be a great value. Plus, Norton Buffalo uses Huang harmonicas exclusively, which is a nice endorsement of their usefulness.
As for the reed breaking, this occasionally happens with all kinds of harps. I don't think it's fair to Huang to generalize that they make cheap harmonicas because somebody somewhere once had a reed break on them. It happened to me once with a Hohner Blues Harp (the reed breaking as I was bending a note), causing me no harm except that I was out a harmonica...