Physical Appearance and Construction:
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This whistle is made of heavy aluminum tubing with a brushed satin finish.
The tone holes are fairly large, nicely rounded, evenly spaced, and well centered on the tube. They are slightly larger than the tone holes on my Burke AlPro D. The spacing on the right hand is closer than on some other whistles but it can still be played quite comfortably.
The fipple has a sharp, half-moon shaped curved blade, and a curved windway. Unlike some other curved windway whistles, the windway appears to narrow as it approaches the blade.
The top of the fipple and the block are both also aluminum; if you look very closely, you can tell the wider fipple tube was placed around the whistle tube and then compressed into place. I'm not sure with exactly what equipment this was done--the metal is visibly compressed and it would have taken something with a hell of a lot of force to produce this effect. I'm not sure anything other than compression holds the pieces together, but I'm not worried, as I don't think anything short of a jackhammer would separate them at this point.
The fipple is very comfortably shaped and smoothed and feels good between the lips. The overall appearance is very pleasing and professional.
The Sound
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This whistle has a very soft voice through both octaves, being slightly softer than an Alba Q1. The tone is warm and somewhat bright and complex, and it is extremely well balanced between octaves. The tone is not pure but there is no air in the tone; it is very focused. The whistle takes a moderate amount of air and doesn't require strong blowing to hit the second octave.
I have played this whistle both at home and in session and it works surprisingly well as a session whistle. Even though it's soft, the tone is unique and you can hear yourself play and be heard playing in even a medium-sized indoor session.
At home the soft voice of the whistle is handy for practicing without disturbing anyone.
It's unusual a single whistle works both as a quiet practice whistle and as a session whistle.
This is not a whistle suited for outdoor play, however, as the sound just gets lost.
Tuning
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This is not a tunable whistle, but it easily plays in tune at A=440 and you can push notes around with the breath around five cents over or under in both octaves.
Response
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The whistle speaks easily throughout its range but I do wish it had a slightly stronger bell note. The low D is a bit hollow sounding and won't take much push. This is not a major problem as it is true of many if not most whistles.
The high notes speak very easily and even the high A and B don't require excessive push and aren't shrill.
This whistle responds very smoothly to ornamentation.
Overall, it's a very easy and fun whistle to play.
Conclusions
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A very nice and every well-designed whistle, this is a lot of whistlling bang-for-the-buck.
A minor complaint is that the bell note is not quite as strong as I could wish, but this isn't a major problem and will probably get better as I spend more time with this whistle.
Also, I think it's very cool to have a whistle made in South Africa. It's a long way from home.
Sample Recording
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Here's what the whistle sounds like on the Sirius, a Matt Molloy tune:
http://www.flutesite.com/samples/sirius_imp.mp3
As always, please forgive the faults in the playing and execution as they belong to the player and not the whistle. Also please forgive the sound of the plane flying over at the start of the recording! (That one slipped past me.)
--James
Edit: here are some photos. Quality is not great, but hopefully better than nothing:
left-to-right, Syn D, Impempe D, Burke Wide Bore Brass D
close-up of Impempe whistle fipple from front
and from rear side
