 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: leolollo
Date: 2021-02-10 14:21
Goodmorning everyone
I bought a "vintage" pack of Vandoren v12 reeds (the old small pack, with reeds without a "flow pack").
The package was open, the reeds sound great.
I noticed that every single reed does not have the "V12" logo printed, but simply "Vandoren Paris - France Superiure" (exactly like in the Vandoren Traditional).
The physical form of the reeds, however, seems to me just that of the V12.
I ask those older than me if in the past the V12 reeds did not have the "V12" mold in the back of the reed.
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2021-02-10 20:07
leolollo wrote:
> I ask those older than me if in the past the V12 reeds did not
> have the "V12" mold in the back of the reed.
I thought they did, but it has been a long time and I won't swear to it. But it's easy enough to tell Traditional VD reeds from V.12s. V.12 is thicker - of the blanks I've ever measured (with a caliper across the bark at the end of the vamp) V.12s have rarely been less than 3 mm thick, and the very rare exceptions are very close (>2.85 mm). OTOH the Traditional blanks are only rarely > 2.8 mm, and most are thinner. You can almost always tell by just eyeballing them.
Karl
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Author: cigleris
Date: 2021-02-11 02:43
No, the older boxes without all the wasteful packaging were stamped. I moved off Vandoren around 2008-09 when my last few boxes of traditional reeds were being used up. The quality of the flow packed reeds around that time left a lot to be desired.
Peter Cigleris
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Author: leolollo
Date: 2021-02-11 10:19
Looking at these reeds with eyes, the tip of the upper is as thick as the V12.
Thanks for the advice to measure with the gauge. Now I have confirmation that in the past the V12 reeds had the traditional Vandoren logo printed. The thickness of these reeds is always 3 or 3.1mm. With the same instrument I measure the Vandoren Traditional 2,6 or 2,8mm.
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Author: Jarmo Hyvakko
Date: 2021-02-13 11:42
Oh dear i suddenly feel so old, when someone talks about "vintage V12 reeds".
Jarmo Hyvakko, Principal Clarinet, Tampere Philharmonic, Finland
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Author: donald
Date: 2021-02-13 15:21
Vintage V12s?
Anyway I seem to remember the original V12s were just stamped with the Vandoren logo, no extra V12 designation. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall it being annoying if you got the V12 and Trads mixed up because the only difference was the cut and blank thickness (the V12 tip was rounded like the trads). It wasn't easy to differentiate visually.... That's what I remember anyway (that, and that V12 was more expensive and I didn't have much money).
Post Edited (2021-02-15 01:06)
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Author: John Peacock
Date: 2021-02-17 02:13
I've played on V12's since soon after they came out - I think I got my first box in 1990, and I immediately thought they were in a different league for depth of sound. I keep experimenting with alternatives, but always end up back on V12's. Looking through old boxes, I can tell you that V12 was stamped on the reed in January 2013, but not in March 2011. I had assumed the change would have been associated with the move to bigger boxes and wasteful packaging, but this was long after that switch, which was early 2000s.
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Author: prigault
Date: 2021-02-17 08:29
Wow, that is quite precise, some are keeping their equipment tidy...
I do like my planet, but respecfully I really have a hard time finding anything truly wasteful in Vandoren's packaging:
- the plastic casing is great to physically protect each reed and prevent warping, while allowing grouping/transport in the most convenient way. For me the most convenient for groups of broken-in reeds is a set of (ziplock + humidity pack) for home and old Vandoren boxes for transport because they are smaller and fit better within the instrument case.
- the individual flow-pack wrapping to preserve humidity is a lifesaver for those living in humidity challenged areas (these days humidity is about 25% inside homes in Quebec where I live, and in six months it will be 75-80%), and for guaranteeing that the box one purchases hasn't dried out and degraded since it was produced.
Wasteful IMO would be Amazon shipping a box to you with lots of bubble wrap and within a large cardboard box (which they often do).
If one is so concerned as to classify anything temporally limited as waste, should those who recently offered a bunch of flowers for Valentine's day feel guilty for using the plastic equivalent of a few years of flow-packs for flowers that last a fraction of a reed's life ?
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Author: EricBlack
Date: 2021-02-17 09:16
Does anyone know for sure what the original impetus behind the flow packs was? I always assumed it was to make it easier for music stores to sell individual reeds. With each reed being wrapped separately, it makes it really easy for a music store to split boxes and up charge the reeds. (Assuming they aren’t just buying the 50 reed boxes of flowpack sealed reeds!) No customer has to worry about hygiene/sanitation when they are buying a sealed product and the reed also has the benefit of continuing to exist in a sealed environment outside its original box. If the boxes weren’t designed to be split, the cellophane wrapping on the outside of the box should otherwise function identically in regards to sealing humidity right? I mean after you open it, it would be best to find a more stable humid environment, if the reeds didn’t have flowpacks, but until that point the humidity in the box would be stable right?
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2021-02-17 18:29
prigault wrote:
> - the plastic casing is great to physically protect each reed
> and prevent warping, while allowing grouping/transport in the
> most convenient way.
The plastic holders do nothing, as far as I can see, to prevent warping. Cane can warp within those holders. I've gotten warped reeds out of the box occasionally. And I've sometimes found the plastic holders to be slightly bent, even though the reeds in them were still somehow flat. The tips IMO are equally well protected from being broken in the paper/cardboard holders that reeds like Steuer, Aria, Leuthner, Pilgerstorfer and others are shipped in. Those holders group/transport as well as the plastic, maybe even a little more compactly.
> the individual flow-pack wrapping to preserve humidity is a
> lifesaver for those living in humidity challenged areas (these
> days humidity is about 25% inside homes in Quebec where I live,
> and in six months it will be 75-80%),
Fortunately (I think), I live in a much more moderate climate near Philadelphia, although the indoor relative humidity *can* go as low as 20% in winter without a humidifier running in the room or the house. I've never seen our summer indoor humidity level ever go as high as 80%, so I guess I can count myself as lucky. But, regardless of how much ambient moisture there is in your environment, the reeds will have to function in that humidity level as soon as you open the flow-pack. That might be as drastic as flying through space in an environmentally controlled space ship to Mars and then just opening the hatch and jumping out with no breathing equipment onto the Martian rocks. The flow-packs' protection has only gotten the reeds to you. They give no functional benefit once the packaging is opened. From there, you and the reeds have to deal with your local atmosphere, not the one in France they came from. Whether you maintain a constant humidity with humidipacks or simply wet them for a longer time in dry weather, the reeds aren't in Paris anymore - regardless of how they were packaged on arrival.
> Wasteful IMO would be Amazon shipping a box to you with lots of
> bubble wrap and within a large cardboard box (which they often
> do).
>
Agreed! Why do they do that?
> If one is so concerned as to classify anything temporally
> limited as waste, should those who recently offered a bunch of
> flowers for Valentine's day feel guilty for using the plastic
> equivalent of a few years of flow-packs for flowers that last a
> fraction of a reed's life ?
>
Well, first, if you account for the reeds in a given box of Vandorens that will never see useful life as reeds (because they're not playable), I don't know if this equivalence even holds. But the plastic holders would be a far smaller problem if they were universally recyclable. Meanwhile, there's no good reason that I can see why the cardboard holders that so many other reed manufacturers use aren't a viable solution. They're far better than the way Vandorens and most other reeds were boxed 50 years ago - lying loose in layers separated by paper. Once Vandoren moved to the narrow boxes of 10 with the septum in the center, they even dispensed with the paper separators with a piece of Styrofoam jammed into the top of the box to hold everything in place.
In any case, these are, IMO, two separate issues, the foil flow-packs and the plastic holders. The problem of the plastic holders can be resolved easily enough. The individual foil packaging is, I think, a nuisance that is a non-solution to what is for many of us a non-problem.
Karl
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2021-02-17 18:35
EricBlack wrote:
> If the boxes weren’t designed to be split, the
> cellophane wrapping on the outside of the box should otherwise
> function identically in regards to sealing humidity right?
I hadn't thought about this before, but, assuming the plastic is as water-resistant as it looks, it ought to function the same way. If not the plastic VD currently uses, some other kind of clear wrap should be able to provide the same level of impermeability as the foil. All the other reeds I mentioned in the post above, I think, come with the outer boxes wrapped in clear plastic.
Karl
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Author: BethGraham
Date: 2021-02-17 21:43
"If one is so concerned as to classify anything temporally limited as waste, should those who recently offered a bunch of flowers for Valentine's day feel guilty for using the plastic equivalent of a few years of flow-packs for flowers that last a fraction of a reed's life ?"
Yes.
As to the waste, the individual reed packaging is not recyclable, not are the plastic reed holders truly sustainable, even though they can be recycled.
I would dearly love Vandoren to do better.
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Author: John Peacock
Date: 2021-02-18 13:34
Well, that was an interesting set of responses. I think we have to be clear that it's not going to make any difference to saving the planet whether or not Vandoren use a little bit of extra plastic in packing reeds. If I cared about saving the planet, I should really have turned off my gas central heating this winter - but I didn't. I feel a bit ashamed about this, but not enough to act, it seems.
No, the wastefulness I deplore in Vandoren is the use of space. The volume devoted to holding 10 reeds has expanded by a factor 10 in the time I've been playing. The current boxes are too big to fit inside most cases. And the foil wrappers are just an irritation when wanting to break in a new box. I take the point about humidity, but indeed that can be dealt with by shrink-wrapping the whole box.
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Author: John Peacock
Date: 2021-02-19 02:56
For interest, here is a timeline of reed-box bloat. In order, roughly 1960, 1970, 1980, 1995, Today. It's not an encouraging trend. The 1960 one is before my time, but it was with an old instrument I got on eBay. A rather prettier design than the ones that followed. It's a simple cardboard box with no internal structure, whereas 1970 vintage had a divider to force two ranks of 5 reeds side by side. 1980 was a plastic version of 1970, and needing a strong fingernail to persuade it to open.
Post Edited (2021-02-19 03:01)
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2021-02-19 03:29
Thanks. I remember every one of them.
Karl
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Author: prigault
Date: 2021-02-20 06:41
John, thanks a million for this image! It is worth a thousand words per box for me.
Those violet boxes immediately took me back to my child and teenager self. I knew the old (pre-10-reed) boxes used to be different but had completely forgotten about how they looked. My memory probably started to suppress these memories in 1990, when a house fire destroyed my clarinet (beloved buffet RC), my scores and all the tangible memorabilia of 9 years of conservatory and 8 of youth orchestra. And yes, those boxes were hard to open and close, I remember now.
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