Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "Why Oboes Are So Expensive | So Expensive | Business Insider" video.

  1. african blackwood is used because of its acoustic qualities (it's extremely dense and resonant). the cracking is due to moisture changes from condensation and spit during playing, and then drying in storage. all wood contracts while drying, and if it doesn't contract evenly enough, its shape changes enough to crack from internal tension. the moisture cycling in various steps of pre-shaping for years during production described in the video is done because it very slowly decreases the intensity of the wood's reaction to moisture changes (both the age alone and the moisture cycling do). and of course, as they mentioned, they use it to weed out pieces that grew in such a way that they deform unevenly during moisture changes, causing them to crack. by making them crack during production, the makers prevent those pieces from ending up on instruments, and cracking after being sold.
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  2.  @PreservationEnthusiast  LOL quit lying, you can not buy an excellent sounding oboe for 200$ no matter what it's made from! though it does seem plausible in principle that for about 2000$, one could make a carbon fiber composite oboe that has acoustic qualities similar to african blackwood. but the precision machining will always be quite expensive.
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  3.  @PreservationEnthusiast  I'm a violin maker, and you are clueless.
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  4. the supposed sustainable harvesting of african blackwood is a TOTAL lie, it is a particularly badly overexploited wood. african blackwood has for the past 15+ years been heavily exploited by chinese companies. it's used as an ebony replacement on cheap chinese violins and such, even though traded through proper channels, african blackwood is supposed tobe more expensive than ebony. clearly the chinese are getting it through shady ways, linked to china's semi-colonialist influence particularly in the east of africa. it's also illegal to trade internationally without CITES documents, and the chinese never have CITES documents, they just pretend that it's ebony which doesn't require them (telling the woods apart requires aome experience, but is not very difficult unless painted black, which chinese producers often do to get their products through customs checks, which are legally supposed to seize undocumented african blackwood but apparently never do). I checked a few years ago what sort of woods are sold on the giant chinese online platform alibaba (kinda like ebay, but with a lot of wholesale), and I found dozens of completely open listings of CITES regulated or export banned woods being sold by the container load, including african blackwood, and even more infamously endangered madagascar rosewood and madagascar ebony (which due to bad governance were mostly being cut illegally in national parks).
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  5. to be fair, I think this company is certainly buying CITES-certified wood at a premium price, and it is possible that the overall rather small amount of wood they are using genuinely does come from particular places that practice somewhat sustainable forestry. that's just not at all what's generally happening with african blackwood, this wood is clearly being cut and exported at shockingly cheap prices and in large volumes, given how commonly it is used on very cheap chinese products in spite of the fact that by quality, rarity, and low growth speed, it is supposed to be one of the absolute most expensive woods. its hardness is nearly unrivaled (harder than ebony, about equal to snakewood), it has a very dark colour with often very attractive figure, it's arguably prettier than ebony because it's very reflective and ebony is not, and it has an exceptionally resonant sound which makes it a great wood for many kinds of instruments, like woodwinds, guitars, or xylophones. the way the chinese are using it even on garbage instruments (like 100-200$ violins) suggests that they are buying it even cheaper than they could get the much more common and faster growing macassar ebony from indonesia, or that weird spotted soft ebony from india or the brown ebony they use in vietnam. even normal african ebony should be cheaper than african blackwood, but that's clearly more expensive in china, as it's hardly ever used on cheap instruments. the chinese can't even be paying 10% of what african blackwood is worth!
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  6.  @PreservationEnthusiast  you better be a child xD
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