[CAUT] RE:O's & L's & A's

[Jeff Tanner]

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On Jan 31, 2006, at 10:36 AM, William Schneider wrote:

> You never know what to take seriously these days and what is  
> ironic, but to
> take the risk: What's so stupid about L's? I love L's, I love O's.  
> I love
> 6'2" A's, but I love the 6'4" better (I take care of two and have  
> rebuilt
> several) and wish Steinway was reintroducing that A, but they're  
> not. I
> predict that after a discreet period of dissing L's, a legend will  
> arise
> that they were the best, and the O will be under appreciated.
um, convenient edit:
> That's What Wilbur Miller, institutional sales director of Hamell  
> Music
> (Michigan Steinway dealers) has told me. He says it's a 6'2.  
> Historically
> they came in two versions, one with a separate tenor bridge, and  
> one with a
> continuous tenor-treble bridge. I expect it will be the latter, but  
> am not
> sure.
>
> Bill Schneider
>

On the A:
My best recollection from the Steinway marketing material was that  
historically, there were three versions of the A, and that the A they  
are reintroducing is a bit of a hybrid of the three.

On the L/O:
I'm with you.  What's wrong with the L?  I like it better than the  
O's I've seen.  But I've also got to admit I never saw a new O in  
person before -- only old ones with vertigris and poorly rebuilt ones  
-- so I can't compare apples to apples.  I'm not 90 years old.  But  
I've enjoyed the new Ls just fine.

My take is that the reintroduction of both these two models is simply  
a marketing scheme that's going to play on nostalgia.  They're going  
to use that "don't make 'em like they used to" to get people to buy  
the "like they used to" models.  The price is going to jump up  
(that's how the auto industry increases the prices of cars -- they do  
away with old models, introduce new ones at a higher price, then  
reintroduce the "vintage" models again at 3 times the price.)

Personally, I really don't see the need to introduce the A.  For  
$4000 more, you can have a B.  And at that price level, that's really  
a drop in the bucket of money compared to the difference in piano  
size.  It's not like you're moving up from a Yamaha C3 to a C6, where  
the price is much more for much more piano.  And this reintroduction  
of the L absolutely has to be a marketing trick.  Period.

We're having a Steinway rep here in a couple weeks.  I now have  
plenty of questions for him now.

Jeff


Jeff Tanner, RPT
University of South Carolina




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