No way can this be worth it. Ebay selling this for $500 with more bids to come. Are they all nuts? No mouthpiece is worth $500!

Spend the money on some private lessons and let the teacher know you are mostly interested in improving your tone. Make sure they try out your horn to make sure it is mechanically sound. A stock yamaha mouthpiece is plenty than adequate for what you are doing.

Stick with the Yamaha 4C - it's the best mpc. for the YAS-23 alto. Try a medium or medium soft La Voz reed. I play a Selmer Superbalanced Action tenor with a rubber Wolfe Tayne #6 mpc in a swing band -am a player for 55 years!

Well, your at the cross roads of what am I going to do now. You've been playing four years and I don't know how advance you are, but if your playing in the pit, you have to have some reading and performing ability. In my day, the most popular mouth pieces were the Otto Link metal, the Brillhart, Berg Larson, Wolfe Tayne, etc... Today there are so many mouth pieces, even I don't know where to turn to, so I keep playing my Otto Links, but have broken away and I'm trying a new metal mouth piece on the scene. I will tell you what I think of that one in the future, but you need to find a store that will let you try different mouth pieces and just run through a host of different opennings and materials to find the right one for you. It may be an Otto Link, or one of the new mouth pieces on the market. In other words, if your present mouth piece is not giving you what you feel you need as you are developing. You need to choose a mouth piece that's going to forefill your needs now and in the future especially when you replace this yamaha for a professional horn. Mouth pieces are like wife's, if your not careful you'll wind up with a box full of mouth pieces you'll never use... Hope this helps and God bless. Phil