It bought the production facilities owned by Charles Gerard Conn, a major figure in early manufacture of brasswinds and saxophones in the USA.

There are three existing stories of how this occurred, but the popularly accepted version is that Del Crampton slugged him in the mouth outside a saloon where both of them had been drinking.

Conn met Eugene Victor Baptiste Dupont, a brass instrument maker and designer and a former employee of Henry Distin of London.

By 1877, Conn's business had outgrown the back of his grocery store, and he purchased an idle factory building on the corner of Elkhart Avenue and East Jackson.

Conn's partnership with Dupont was dissolved by March 1879, but he was successful in attracting skilled craftsmen from Europe to his factory, and in this manner he expanded his operation so that by 1905, Conn had the world's largest musical instrument factory producing a full line of wind instruments, strings, percussion, and a portable organ.

Conn partnered with Albert T. Armstrong, Joseph Jones, and Emory Foster to manufacture a twin-horn disc phonograph called the 'Double-Bell Wonder' that was produced in two iterations briefly in early 1898 before a lawsuit by the Berliner Gramophone Company caused production to cease.

Brick-red 'Wonder' records were also pressed for the 'Double-Bell Wonder' talking machine by the Scranton Button Works from pirated Berliner masters.

Conn was en route from California to Elkhart when his factory burned, and upon arriving home he was met with a public demonstration, a way of showing popular sympathy.

In 1889, Conn founded the Elkhart Daily Truth, published the monthly Trumpet Notes and a scandal sheet called The Gossip, and purchased The Washington Times, which he later sold.

Under Greenleaf's leadership the company converted distribution from mail-order to retail dealers and expanded its product line through acquisitions.

Greenleaf expanded and upgraded C. G. Conn's plant to increase production and developed new lines of wind instruments to sell.

By 1917, using a new hydraulic expansion process which Greenleaf introduced to the plant, the assembly-line work force had increased to 550 employees who were turning out about 2500 instruments a month.

By the late 1920s the success of Conn's latest "New Wonder" model saxophones with dance orchestras was gaining widespread attention, leading European manufacturers to produce horns closer to the deeper, richer, bolder "American" sound.

Selmer (Paris) introduced the American-sounding "New Largebore" model in 1929 and the new Julius Keilwerth Company in Czechoslovakia produced saxophones influenced by the C. G. Conn design, including rolled tone holes and microtuners.

Under Leland Greenleaf's directorship, the department developed the first short-action piston valves (1934), and the 'Stroboconn' (1936), the first electronic visual tuning device.

Under Greenleaf's saxophone specialists Allen Loomis and Hugh Loney, C. G. Conn's research and development resulted in the designs of the 6M alto (1931), 10M tenor (1934), and 12M baritone (1930).

The 12M baritone was the first saxophone with both bell keys on the right side, followed by the King Voll-True II (1932) and Selmer Balanced Action (1936).

From 1935 through 1943, C. G. Conn produced the 26M and 30M "Connqueror" alto and tenor saxophones, featuring screw-adjustable keywork and improved mechanisms for the left hand cluster.

C. G. Conn's combined abilities in close-tolerance manufacturing and electronic devices made them a valuable resource for wartime production.

[4] A special application of C. G. Conn's "Coprion" process—creating seamless brass bells by depositing copper on a mandrel—was to manufacture silver bearing inserts for the Wright Cyclone airplane engines.

Priorities changed under Gazlay, with the high-quality wind instruments on which the company had built its reputation becoming an increasingly marginal interest.

Even though the device achieved some popularity with Jazz artists, like e.g. Tom Scott using it on some of his early recordings, it didn't stop the decline of the company.

The same year, Henkin acquired King Musical Instruments of Eastlake, Ohio from the defunct Seeburg Corporation's creditors.

[8] The Swedish investment firm Skåne Gripen bought Henkin's other companies and merged them in 1986 to create a new parent corporation, United Musical Instruments (UMI), headquartered in Nogales, Arizona.

UMI closed the Conn Brasswind facility in Abilene, Texas (1986), moving brass instrument production to the King plant in Eastlake.

Their most notable feature is that the diameter of the pad extends over the rim of the key-cup, thereby giving a slightly wider surface area for the rolled tone-hole to seal onto.

Though designed to fix into key-cups purely via friction, most saxophone repairers glue them in place using shellac or hot melt adhesive.

However, it is possible to fit standard pads to any saxophone with rolled toneholes (and many people do) without any noticeable disadvantage regarding the quality of sound produced.

The feature was devised to allow the saxophone to be tuned while maintaining optimal volume in the chamber of the mouthpiece, thus avoiding disturbance to intonation.

The benefits of the microtuner to intonation have been shown to be more theoretical than practical, with the drawbacks that the internal mechanism requires extra cleaning and maintenance and is a potential source of leaks.