Merchant finds blowhards are his best customers.

• Position: Vince Simonetti's Tuba Exchange - Company profile

Merchant finds blowhards are his best customers

Vince Simonetti thinks big. As a high-school musician in New Jersey, he blithely abandoned the trumpet for the weightier tones of the tuba.

It turned out to be the right instrument for Simonetti, now 46. He won a scholarship to the Manhattan School of Music and performed professionally. A 1966 tour brought him to North Carolina, and he joined the N.C. Symphony the next year.

He built a piano-repair business and left the symphony in 1975 to pursue it full time. Four years later, Simonetti opened a store in Durham and started selling pianos.

In 1984, the tuba brought Simonetti a big break: At a Chicago trade show for musical-instrument manufacturers, he took his mouthpiece out of his pocket and picked up a tuba at a display booth. "I was sitting there puffing away, and this man came up to me and asked me if I wanted to play one of his tubas." The man was Rudolf Meinl, an eminent German tuba manufacturer.

"I asked him if he would allow us to import his instruments," Simonetti says. Meinl said yes, and Simonetti was in business. The company he started, The Tuba Exchange, now sells and repairs nothing but tubas and their musical cousins, the euphonium and the sousaphone. As far as he knows, it's the only business of its kind.

Simonetti carries tubas from 10 manufacturers - about three-fourths of the world's tuba makers. He also sells used tubas...