well, I bought a Stanesby copy by Aulos.

It's a very very sweet sounding flute. Bilbo's right - the air column is very different from Boehm playing and I've been overdoing it, making it very wispy and rustly in tone. Now it's better.

The problem I'm having, which I'm not sure if anyone can really help with, since it may be a design fault - is that the 3rd octave F/F sharp are very difficult to sound without overtones. The instructions indicate that these notes are difficult.

I didn't find this problem with more expensive traversos (ho hum..) and wonder if this is just a limitation of the Aulos Stanesby. Is it a limitation of all the Stanesby copies? The forked F in the first and second octaves are less problematic.