Nanohedron wrote:But I need to point out that the ramp may be the only thing that makes the difference; looking at Ben's pics, both Killarneys' ramp surfaces show tooling that I would have considered rough, and furthermore each looks differently done. I wonder if leaving the ramp this way is by design, from the maker's experience that such roughness is what brings out better tonal focus somehow. One would think it causes turbulence, but maybe that's the trick, and if true, how it's done could make even more difference. It's a thought, anyway.
You're right that the tooling on the ramp of each does look rough. It's odd that it doesn't lead to any sort of roughness in the tone. Well, not to my ear, at any rate.
However, as to whether all of the differences are down to the differences in the head, you'll see in my original post that I tried to factor in for that:
benhall.1 wrote:It occurred to me that a lot of the differences between the two whistles may be because of the head, which is just slightly different (as you’ll see when I put pics up). So, of course, in good C&F tradition, I swapped the heads. A lot of the differences were lessened when I did that, but not all. The old head played pretty well on the brass bodied whistle and I slightly preferred the sound to the old head on the nickel bodied whistle; the new head (from the brass bodied whistle) improved the nickel bodied whistle; but the best combination was definitely the new head on the brass bodied whistle.
