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.