I suppose I fall into the BullTom camp regarding my opinion of the sound and realism of a trumpet...or any other type of suction call. From my personal experience in hearing (conservatively) many hundreds of hen turkeys in the woods, there has only been ONE time that I have heard a real hen turkey sound like a suction call to MY ears...or at least the sound of the suction calls I have heard from the great majority of hunters I have heard using one of them. That bird was not in sight when I heard it, and I concluded that the sound was coming from someone using a trumpet/wingbone/etal. I admit I was shocked when the hen making the sound came into sight.
On the other hand, I have heard those same hundreds of hens "out there" that sounded either like a friction call of some sort...or another form of air-operated call (mouth call/tube). I won't even get into the discussion about how, out of those hundreds of hens, the "noises" they make have varied from the classic "box-call yelp" to everything all the way down to that of a braying donkey.
Regardless of my personal opinion, however, if somebody wants to pursue becoming proficient enough with any type of suction call to regularly kill gobblers with them, more power to them. Furthermore, if that somebody has convinced themselves that they killed a particular gobbler due only to their mastery of a trumpet, then even more power to them. I admire that dedication to our pastime. However, my own opinion on the matter is that 1) I will never be convinced that a gobbler that is killed by someone using a trumpet could not have been killed by someone using another type of call, and 2) that a gobbler that did not come to that suction call someone is using would not willingly come to a hunter that chose, at that moment, to use another type of call.
In summation, a guy is much better off hitting on whatever sound/calling sequence a gobbler wants to hear at any given moment than he is swearing by any particular type of calling device (which, by the way, is curious of me to say since I use mouth calls almost exclusively
). Yes, that preferred calling device may, in any given encounter with a gobbler, be a trumpet...or it may, in the next encounter, be the call you have that sounds like that braying donkey.
