Photo gallery: See, hear the chimes

With the arrival of the Basso Profundo, the race to outdo the neighbors has moved into yard ornaments.

At 14 feet tall, with a deep register and a $2,000 price tag, these wind chimes likely have won it.

The Basso Profundo, predictably made by a company in Texas, also strikes some precision chords: Workers at Music of the Spheres in Austin use sophisticated tools to hone their chimes' notes.

But good pitch and good taste don't always go together, and as conversation pieces go, this one will split opinions at the barbecue.

On the pro-Profundo side is Charlie Overstreet, whose family owns the two Northwest True Value Hardware stores in the Roanoke Valley that sell the chimes - the store in Salem and the one in Roanoke on Brambleton Avenue.

"People that can hear music - I happen to be tone-deaf - can tell that it is right," he said. "This company is on to something. They never discount squat."

At the Brambleton Avenue store, customer Deborah Bowen passed the chimes' tall black pipes unaware. "A chime. Is that what that is?" Bowen asked. "My husband would kill me. It's way too big for my house."

Size, however, was a minor concern for Bill Phoenix, a member of the Salem Men's Garden Club. "I'm ambivalent at best about wind chimes," said Phoenix, whose wife has hung smaller chimes in their garden. "If the wind blows that thing off and it ends up on the ground, that's just fine with me."

Larry Roark, a classically trained player of the euphonium (an instrument that resembles a baby tuba), started Music of the Spheres in his garage in 1989. He created the Profundo in the mid-1990s, after hours spent on the piano developing the exact tones he would use for his smaller wind chimes, said Sara Eskew, Roark's widow who now runs the business.

However, adapting the notes to the Profundo's low register proved difficult. "The sounds would blend and sound like a generator rather than music," Eskew said last week.

Cast in a tempered aluminum alloy, and coated with an anti-corrosive black finish, the chimes are guaranteed for 15 years.

"But we're really just talking about the string," Eskew said. "That's the weakest link in the chain."

Shelly Monk, an employee at the Northwest store on Brambleton Avenue, has been listening to the Profundo since it came in last year. Monk estimates she has seven or eight wind chimes hanging from her own porch, but never tires of hearing the large chimes at work.

"People will come by and barely ding it," she said. "I say, 'Come on, make them sing.'"