musicandbeautyislife

I've had my Strad (model 37) for about three years now. It has played a little stuffy from the beginning, but I was told it was only because it was a new horn and needed to be broken in. I started having complaints about my intonation, first just common problem pitches, and then in general on every note. the horn seems to have gotten stuffier and stuffier and the intonation seems ot be getting worse. I've had it to our area specialist, who was unable to find anything wrong with it. Many different teachers and students from my school and several surrounding schools have all the same complaints and something just does not feel right about the horn. It's been cleaned recently, and has been looked at by a few other experts who just don't know what to make of it. I've done nothing to cause any damage to the horn, and no one has found anything that throws up a red flag. We've done minor things like changing mouthpieces, which resulted in little or no change, and we traded tuning slides, which seemed to help a little, but not enough to call that the solution to the problem. We put a piece of tap around my mouthpiece and that seemed to help a little as well, as if something is wrong in the receiver as well as somewhere else, because it wasn't enough for me to say it played like any other strad i've played on. I have another horn, so i'm in not in a bad position of not having a horn to be playing on, but i would like to know if anyone has any ideas as to what could be causing this or what i should do about it. any help would be greatly appreciated!