Nothing sounds or plays better than a fine wood clarinet.
The wood clarinets are made from is called Grenadilla or Mpingo wood and comes from northwestern Africa. The wood is not only ideal for tone, but just as importantly, also holds the exacting dimensions of bore and tone holes that are necessary to make the clarinet tune and respond as it should. Once you purchase a fine instrument you want to do all you can to protect the wood from damage and insure dimensional stability. While there are no absolute guarantees that your clarinet will never change there are many things which can be done that will reduce such a possibility dramatically. As you will see, most of them are common sense.