Don Taylor

My apologies, I miscounted. At one time you said that you had designs for a 39 button Troubadour, do you have any plans to make that model?

I do not see a G# on the LHS so you will not be able to play in A. Also, the air button is one of the 36 buttons so the Troubadour has 35 sounding buttons (vs. 34 on an Elise).

I don't understand the keyboard diagrams - neither of them seem to match either the Hayden or the Wicki layouts.

If, and it really is an if, the TAM reeds are louder than the Durall reeds then it might be worth considering a mix - Durall on the LHS and TAM on the RHS.

Yes, that is right.

I was told that a live blind test held by the folks at the BB came to the conclusion that most (maybe all?) folks could not tell the difference..

Yes and yes, same result. No, Alexa does not live here. It is not an internet connection but an unwanted audio stream in use that is my problem. Or was my problem - the fix using powercfg - requestsoverride works for me ... so far.

I assumed from your moniker that you were from the UK, but I see that you are really from a fictional place... If you are asking about buying concertinas than it would be useful to say at least which continent you are in! Since you mention the Button Box I am going to now assume that you are actually in the US? If so then I think that the Button Box still has their instrument rental program for US customers. You can rent a beginner instrument from them on a month by month basis, you can change the instrument monthly until you find a system that suits you and part of the rental fee can be applied against buying an instrument.

Sadly, the audio stream is still in use after changing this setting

I followed the method described in the link Pianist's post after I discovered that there is a way to undo any changes (i.e. mistakes) made when doing this process. After a few failing attempts I finally got it right. This is what worked for me: 1) Open a cmd window with admin privileges. 2) Use "powercfg -requests" to show the exact name of the device connected wit the audio stream that is preventing sleep: The name that worked for me was "High Definition Audio Device". 3) Use "powercfg -requestsoverride" to tell the SYSTEM that the "High Definition Audio Device" DRIVER should not prevent sleeping: Be very careful to get this right as powercfg does not seem to check for valid requests. 4) Check that this has been registered OK, use "powercfg -requestoverride" with no parameters: And that should do the trick. However, if you screw up, as I did several times, then you can use this undocumented feature of powercfg to remove an entry. Re-enter the command that you used in step 3) but omit the last parameter - the word SYSTEM. This is an example of one mistake that I made and how I removed it: This seems to be working OK for me now and also has the added benefit that Musescore also no longer prevents my computer from going to sleep. Apologies to all who find this too geeky and off-topic, and also apologies for not knowing how to fix this same problem in an iPad. Thanks to Pianist for pointing me in the right direction. It would be good if the the forum software could be fixed so that it does not turn off Howard's hearing aid. Don.

Absolutely true and the transaction costs are never made clear beforehand. Both ends charge fees for doing bugger all.

If you buy a cheap Chinese 20B and then find you don't get on with it then you are unlikely to be able to sell it and get your money back. If you buy a playable vintage 20B and find that you do not like it then at least you will be able to sell it for something like what you paid for it. I emphasize playable, buy one from a reputable dealer or a player that you know who can demonstrate that everything works. There are lots of 'project' concertinas out there. Concertinas are expensive, but good ones do tend to hold their value.

The recommended solution seems to be to use : powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE DRIVER "High Definition Audio Device" SYSTEM I am reluctant to try this as there seems to be no way to reverse this override should it go pear shaped (as it did for one responder in the thread). I might give it a go after my next system backup which would allow me to recover if there are any problems. Closing Firefox does enable sleep so that is what I will do for now Roger: As Pianist says, you need admin privileges to run powercfg. Try [Windows key] + cmd then select run as administrator. Bookmarking concertina.net should not cause the problem, you need to have it open in a tab. Don't know about Chrome as I do not have it installed. Don.

You could try swapping the problem spring for one on the lever of a button that you rarely use.

Love the sound of that bass, what is it?