The comparison reed charts for Vandoren and D’addario are professionaly quite accurate!
Providing you know the Strength Number of the Reed you are accustomed to playing you can look it up on the charts and cross reference it with all the other types of reeds to get similar strength of reed.
When i went into my local sax shop, run by a profession orchestral wind instrument player, we got the charts out and compared it to the reed that i was used to playing, and from the charts i was able to pick out 11 different types of reeds, which when i got home all of them were playable except for three reeds that were hard to play.
I was quite surprised because some of the No.3 reeds are very very easy to play, that’s down to the way the different reeds are cut.
There are two major problems with doing a demo of different types of reeds, one is when you listen to the reed.
If you listen to a recording of the reed it’s vastly different to how the reeds sounds when you play the sax.
listening to a recording only hears how nice the reed sounds.
Playing the reed on the sax is different, as you can physically feel how the reed is behaving in terms of resistance and response, the sound you hear in your head is also slightly different to the recorded sound.
Also taking into account i tried 11 different reeds on the same mouthpiece and some were closely identical and some were vastly different. But that’s just one mouthpiece, there must hundreds of different types of mouthpieces, and each of those mouthpiece designs are going to sound and behave differently with those same 11 reeds.
So if someone does a recording, testing a bunch of reeds, it’s only going to be of use if they are using the same mouthpiece make and size number as the one you possess – so basically you’ve got to do your own test, there is no other way round it.
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