i was chatting to my local sax shop owner today, and he was telling about 20 years ago they they bought 5 brand new Selmers and they had to send all of them back to manufacturer, they hadn’t been assembled properly, and none of them could play in tune.
My jaw fell on the floor!
He was also telling about the selmer mouthpieces, the reason why the old mouthpieces sound different is because Selmer lost the original moulds that they made the older mouthpiece from, so they had to start from scratch and create new moulds.
.