pancelticpiper wrote:With Low Whistles you more or less get what you pay for.
I've not played a Low D that I thought was worth playing for under the $250-300 range.
Setting aside the serendipitous finding of a used one cheaply, of course.
(High whistles are a different tale, with ones selling for around $10 often outperforming ones costing hundreds.)
I don't have anywhere near pancelticpiper's experience, so discount my words appropriately.
I went on a low whistle quest about this time last year. I have the plastic Dixon, a Howard, the Kerry Optima, and two expensive low whistles, both MK's.
The Mk's are definitely better instruments in an objective sense. They have more range and more power: they are louder but can also be played softer than any of the other whistles without losing the octave. The articulations are crisp and fast. The tone is "strong" and decisive with a solid fundamental tone. It's a little much in the high end in a small room. They're like a luxury performance sedan: if Jason Statham played a low whistle in the transporter movies it'd be the MK. They are a little hard to hold I find
The Howard is really cool but really odd. It has a unique tone like an organ pipe or a bagpipe, "reedy" is maybe the word. I find it easy to play and kind of love it, but it's an odd tone: continuing the car analogy it's like an old pickup truck or an old traction engine.
The Optima as mentioned plays more like a high whistle and the tone is more like a Generation/Feadog style high whistle. To stretch the car analogy I'd maybe compare it to a good reliable economy car. It can't do all the things the luxury performance sedan does, but it can do most of those things