What is the best choice for a bandoneon: zinc or aluminum?

This is the most typical question in the bandoneon world: Which are the best plates, Aluminum or Zinc and why its price?

The discussion could go on ad infinitum. It is a topic with many edges, since it is ultimately a matter of taste. And as my grandmother used to say, "there is nothing written about tastes".

Let's try to shed some historical notions on the subject to understand how the use of these materials came about. Before the 1940s, zinc was a widely used material because it was cheap, corrosion resistant and easy to machine, i.e. it had advantages for shaping and working. Before the 1940s, aluminum alloys were still rare in industry:

While in 1882 the annual production of aluminum reached only 2 tons, in 1900 it reached 6,700 tons, in 1939 700,000 tons, in 1943 2,000,000 tons, and since then it has not stopped increasing, becoming the most produced non-ferrous metal today.

As it is a lighter, more resistant metal with anticorrosive properties similar to zinc, it is understandable to find it in the catalogs of the time (pre-war), in bandoneon brands such as Alfred Arnold, in the highest ranges of instruments, such as the complete mother-of-pearl and Louis XIV models.

In the 1940s, industry in general found new uses for aluminum. As a metal that was easy to work and had a much greater presence in the earth's crust, it allowed lower production costs in almost all industries. It is therefore logical that it was integrated to a greater extent in the production of bandoneons. But it must be taken into account that by that time, most of the bandoneons that were part of the "golden age" of tango with worldwide boom had their plates made of zinc, and their sound had been installed as a standard within the genre that placed the bandoneon as a star. That is why today we find Zinc as the most valued material in the plates or combs of our bandoneons.

The bandoneon GROWS if we ALL learn.