Mujitsu and Tairaku's Shakuhachi BBQ

Not sure I understand the question

Expensive compared to Madake? I don't think price is based on type of bamboo, but rather on quality of the SOUND, type of shakuhachi (jinashi or jiari), amount of time and work it takes to make and craftmanship and experience of the maker.
The Chinese root end from Mujitsu are very well made and very reasonably priced with great SOUND..... Anyway, I think the Chinese bamboo we see used for shakuhachi is Madake , but (I'll leave that for others to answer)....

I think our man from Russia meant "inexpensive". The sentence and the message make sense then. English is a language full of tricks

If I could write in Russian as well as he writes in English I would consider myself very accomplished, indeed!

Apart from what was already mentioned, I would assume that part of the reason why some flutes can cost as much as ten times the amount of other flutes that look almost the same is that as you get closer to perfection it gets harder to push it further. Say, it might take only few hours to make some kind of shakuhachi that works more or less fine. It might take another hour or two if you want the tuning to be on spot. However, if you want to start tweaking every little detail you end up spending a lot of time. Going from a bamboo stick to playable flute is a much faster step than going from a playable flute to nearly perfect flute. You might want to have a specific kind of bamboo in your best flutes. This kind of bamboo might well be one out of every thousand you collect. For a simple flute you could accept a piece that isn't exactly what you would want in ideal case. That might bring you down to one in every ten pieces of bamboo range.

It's a rather common thing with any sort of work that approaching perfection becomes more and more expensive as you get closer. This, however, doesn't necessarily mean that the flute that is 99% of what the maker wanted is much worse than 99.99%. Both of those flutes would be great, yet one of them has some features that the maker wanted to have and which bumped up the difficulty and thus the price. Someone who is very skilled could make the last fraction of a percent work for him whereas a beginner might not even notice the difference.

dreamofnobody wrote:

Sorry, I have done a mistake in my first post. I have meant Chinese bamboo flutes (180-250$) are cheaper than madake flutes (600$ and higher) of course.

Sorry for the confusion. The reason for this price differential is simple. The Chinese bamboo is cheaper to buy and also not as good in quality as the fine Japanese madake. So the flutes are priced accordingly. Generally with the American makers such as Ken, Perry and Monty they are pretty straightforward in pricing their flutes according to the quality.