I wonder if Buffet or Boosey & Hawkes ever made, errr, office chairs (!) as a sideline? 

I don't actually know all that much about clarinets apart from the ones I play (I play Buffet Festivals and if you were to ask me about Selmers, Leblancs, Eatons, Wurlitzers or Seggelkes I wouldn't be able to tell you anything useful) but I do know you shouldn't write off an instrument without giving it a try. There are some deeply dodgy wooden clarinets and some surprisingly good let's say non-wooden ones...

On the other hand unless the price is money you can afford to throw away I think you should never buy an instrument without trying it.

The important thing with a student clarinet (I reckon) is that it blows OK (i.e. without some notes being much harder work than others) and is reasonably in tune; it needs to make an OK sound but it will be a while before a student can notice the things which differentiate a good instrument from an OK one. The only thing you really don't want a student instrument to do is create bad habits (whether of mouth or ear) which might have to be undone later. In a sense a plastic clarinet can be an option worth exploring in that should the student move on to a wooden one the plastic one can still be useful, when playing outdoors for example. A wooden student one will simply be superseded by any later instrument. (That's a thought which mainly comes from recorder-land but I think it applies to clarinet too.)

You can also work wonders on a substandard clarinet with a really good mouthpiece and professional quality clarinet mouthpieces are really very inexpensive for what they are. Go to a good shop such as Howarth's (or Vandoren if you're in Paris!) and they'll let you try out mouthpieces which are no different from what orchestral or solo professionals use; work your way through the Vandoren range for example and you'll not only have a great time but you'll learn a lot about the possibilities available.

I'm a mere amateur when it comes to single-reed instruments, but surely the most important factors in quality of sound are (in no particular order): the mouthpiece, the reed and the embouchure. As long as the keys work properly, the rest of the instrument is of less importance.

It seems to be the key to perpetual motion in the recorder world; the debate about whether a mass-produced instrument in synthetic material is better than one individually crafted in a natural material just refuses to lay down.

It depends I suppose whether you perceive an instrument as in some way having a personality. (I hesitate to use the word 'soul' but maybe I shouldn't.) I do derive a certain pleasure from my wooden recorders that I don't have from my plastic ones which isn't necessarily to do with the sound. Having said that I don't know how that works with clarinets though: I'm not really sure I feel my wooden bass has somehow more 'soul' than my metal contra.

Indeed I do sometimes imagine that my contra might have an idea what's happened to it over the years, setting out from Paris and arriving in Sydney at the Conservatorium in the '60s, being variously used and misused by students who came along and doubtless expected it to work immediately rather than spending any quality time with it, ending up in a battered old wooden case in a cupboard and being dragged out once a year if that, until being hauled out by this silly person who dragged it around the place playing weird solo pieces and eventually bought it and brought it back to Paris again, then eventually to Köln, having it thoroughly overhauled by the Gate Master of the Black Forest and getting a nice new case for it, bringing it on reasonably high-profile gigs every few weeks where it has pretty interesting things to do. I do sometimes hope it prefers that to mouldering in a cupboard.

Richard, you simply just gotta give details of that, before I drown in my own salivation. 

Indeed.  Bring it along. Come to think of it, it may be useful for what we have planned.

Oh, sorry everyone - as you were. Ahem.