Steinway Upright Dampers

[PIANOBIZ@aol.com]

To all who followed this subject about three weeks ago.

I had complained that I was unable to locate some ringing on phantom sounds
coming from a Steinway upright that we had restored.  We had muted off all
non-speaking lengths of wire, checked for damper bleed,  installed over
dampers, you name it we had tried it. I even removed the wooden framed metal
screens on the back of the piano and experienced some improvement.  One
technician suggested that the board might be contributing to this problem and
I wanted to check that out.  The people left town and I was unable to revisit
the piano until this week.

It turned out that the bass strings were the culprit after all, not the
soundboard (I'm embarrassed).  I had mistakenly ruled out the strings at
first because I had checked for poor string dampening by placing my hand over
the strings above the dampers. Since this had no effect, I ruled out the
strings as contributors.  But this part of the string was sufficiently muted
and was not the origin of the sounds.

When I rapped the board with my knuckle and placed my arm on the lower part
of the bass strings,just above the bass bridge,  the phantom sounds did stop.
 The strings were indeed moving.  The lower part of these bass strings are
very unaffected by the dampers and have a definite life of their own.  The
problem is only diagnosed at this stage.  Perhaps my next step is to try the
oversized dampers, as someone had suggested, to see if this will help dampen
the sympathetic volume. I kind of doubt it will but am going to try it.  It
really is annoying.


David Sanderson
Pianobiz@aol.com