Wapin(s?) @ Providence

[Ron Nossaman]

The little Everett in the rebuilders' showcase wasn't put there by the
Wapin folks. That was a speculative first attempt by Tony Gears to see how
the system sounded in a small piano and, being an experiment on his part, I
doubt that he lavished an extraordinary amount of care on the detail work.
That, after all, was part of the sales pitch for the conversion. Make a
small piano sound like a big piano without having to replace the entire
piano, and all that. I don't know that it sounded like a big piano, but it
certainly sounded different than the standard bridge configuration would
have. The bass/tenor scale break problems, and the killer octave attack
distortion and relatively short sustain were still there, and in just the
areas of the scale where one would expect to find them, though the sustain
in the killer octave was better than I would have expected, so there seems
to be some beneficial effect. I didn't much care for the overall quality of
the sound produced though. It had a vague sitar like quality to it. That's
admittedly a personal, subjective, and probably biased opinion, but I
believe a better soundboard assembly and string scale on that same piano
would have blown the Wapin away in sound production and sounded more like a
piano in the process. In all fairness, I think this piano had the original
soundboard, and even a new board of the same design would have probably
helped the sound, though I can't say how much. Realistically, there were
too many unanswered questions and too many things left undone to nail
anything down from this one sampling.

I was told there was a Wapinized Baldwin (L?) there too, but I was unable
to locate it to give it a listen. I regretted that, because I expected it
was a better done example of the system, and I wanted to hear the best
shot. Was it even there? If so why wasn't it out where it could be seen and
checked out? Just wondering. 

For what it's worth, these are my impressions so far.

Ron N