Rick, Does Glen Reid do any building of octave mandolins, I stumbled across his site once, but don't remember where.Oh and Wesley, one cheap way to hear snippets of different players is to go the www.greenlinnet.com and search their catalog by instruments such as cittern, bouzouki, octave mandolin, and mandocello. They have a lot of sound samples from their artists available. You can then do a little detective work to try to find out details of any instrument you like the sound of. John