Note from Nophachai: Many workshops/factories of French's woodwind makers in 19th c. and 20th C. were in La Couture, including the founding brothers of the Martin Freres who were born and established their workshop also in La Couture. So I would guess that their instruments during the first half of 20th c. were probably made there as well. This information was shared on 2012-06-09 at woodwind.org by DaveMoyer: Martin Freres was founded sometime
around 1840 in France by the Martin brothers. All three founding
brothers died before the end of the century, but the company lived on
and manufactured a lot of student-edition woodwinds near the beggining
of the 20th century. The LaMonte models are popular examples of these.
Most of the Martin instruments you'll see on eBay and such are student
models... they were specifically designed to be cheap and so they suffer
from poor playability and poor sound quality compared to a lot of other
brands. That's why they are typically sold for cheap online these days.
However, the Bb clarinet model 1740 "De Luxe" was a professional model.
Typically produced sometime around 1910-1925 (-ish) they were far
superior to the student models. I have one myself, still with the
original leatherbound wood and brass case. I've seen a few online
articles by people who have played on them and we all agree that the
sound quality is quite good if you have the right mouthpiece and
ligature to go with it... but the keys suffer from some little technical
issues. The key setup is a bit harder to get used to compared to other
models, and they like to stick sometimes. From http://martinfreres.net/brief-history/
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