Here’s a rare treat. Courtesy of eBay, here’s a look at how Otto Link advertized its new Otto Link Reso Chamber saxophone mouthpieces in 1940. You can read all about their new Otto Link Reso Chamber and Tone Master models, see the prices, and also see a long list of artists and what they played including facing!

A new Otto Link Reso Chamber mouthpiece was about $200 in today’s money in 1940, and a Tone Master was about $450. So the $199 GS RESO is just about the same price as buying an Otto Link Reso Chamber mouthpiece would have been in 1940! Except that GS RESO is hand faced, which gives you much much greater consistency of facing curve from mouthpiece to mouthpiece. In measuring lots of vintage Otto Links that were original facing, it is amazing to see how much variation there is from mouthpiece to mouthpiece in facing curve and evenness. Nevertheless, the good ones are amazing! We have taken the best facing curves we could find and used those every time on the GS mouthpieces. Otto Link would probably do the same if he were alive today.

Otto Link was such a huge figure in the history of the saxophone. He developed mouthpiece geometry that both tunes well and creates a tonal pallette that made many of the sounds of 20th century saxophone music possible.

Given Otto Link’s tendency to market it’s Reso Chamber hard rubber mouthpieces as affordable alternatives to the casted metal ones, I wonder how similar a Reso’ actual chamber and baffle is to a Tone Master’s. Pretty similar as far as how they look and how they play, but hopefully we can get some detailed chamber scan data done in the near future to compare them scientifically.