Selmer Alto Super Balanced Action

I have my Aquis SBA (1954) a year ago (September 2006) to replace my Series II.
This is a silver model with F # added by David Barault (Workshop of the world).

This saxophone is much fairer than my natural IBS (which was frankly the street, I do not generalize). I just had to adjust the bass (Bb to D) with cork inside the chimneys and the flag for dscendre a little, and some exercise of acute decline.

The main strength of this instrument is the ease with which it allows sentences. The passages are very disctrets registry. The sound is really focused, perhaps a bit dark for some tastes. It has certainly not vulgar at all the brilliance of some SII and SIII most.
The sound is in my opinion light years away from all that is in current production.

I tried most of the models "studies": Yamaha YAS 23, 25, 275, Jupiter.
For Yanagisawa, too.
And in the Selmer Balanced, SBA, Mark VI and VII, SII SIII ... not too many ref 54 (which I still left a good impression)
on the other hand I do not know much Keilwerth, nor all the "cheap Chinese".

Regarding the price, be aware that these instruments cotent quite expensive (especially in the U.S. and even in Korea and Japan) but there are still French sellers who refuse to follow this trend. We can still find SBA between 2500 and 3000 euros. Knowing that unless cotent altos tenors.

This kind of saxophone "vintage" is hard to find. It is a search that takes both but can be worth the effort. If I had one board that would Devita up to buy an old instrument without trying it. It is this kind of practice (closed eyes buy at any price on the grounds that it seems that it's great) who blew up the price ... That's how we find these instruments to more than $ 10 000 on some sites ...