I recently came into possession of a B-flat German tenorhorn from a maker “W. Linsen.” Trying to find more on who this person (or company) was did not yield anything. No mention of W. Linsen anywhere. I understand that there were many, many, many relatively unknown German instrument makers and the quality of the output can be a mixed bag, but this instrument is actually well-made and fully playable after a little refurbishing from my tech. After I dropped it off to my tech this week, he took a look at it and told me to look into the Miraphone 47WL tenorhorn. He noticed that the tubing wrap is completely identical to this instrument with the only noticeable visual difference being the valve hardware is updated with modern linkages. It could just be a coincidence, but he thought WL could be a reference to W. Linsen in some capacity (possibly valve wrap, similarly to how French horns have different wrap styles (Geyer, Kruspe, etc.)).

My next plan is to reach out to Miraphone to see if the 47WL is actually based off of any tenorhorns that W. Linsen may have created, but I wanted to see if anyone here knew anything as well. I am also going to reach back out to the person who I bought this from and see if they know anything more than me. If anyone here also knows of somewhere I can do more digging, let me know. Any help is appreciated here. Thanks!

I'm not familiar with a brand (or dealer, who had his name stamped on a stencil horn) named W. Linsen.

I am familiar with the Miraphone range of tenorhorns and baritones. WL doesn't stand for W. Linsen, the W is for the German word "weit" (big), in comparison to the narrower bore and smaller bell of the regular 47 (which is described with the German word "eng" (narrow)). The L stand for model Loymair.

I have never heard about W. Linsen but I have heard about W. Linsin, maybe you can doublecheck if it says Linsen? Anyway, here is some information about W. Linsin: <LINK_TEXT text="https://www.trompetenforum.de/TF/viewto ... 6&start=15">https://www.trompetenforum.de/TF/viewtopic.php?t=10386&start=15</LINK_TEXT>

You might use some translation tool. As far as I have connected the dots it should be that http://www.musik-linsin.de/ still exists and is lead by the son of Werner Linsin.