M&H

[Delwin D Fandrich]

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Dierauf <mdierauf@mediaone.net>
To: pianotech <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: June 27, 2000 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: M&H


> Jim -
>
>   I suspect that he's de-valuing the piano because of its three bridge
> design. The fellow who taught me tuning used to wholesale the AA's to the
> southwest, and keep the A's to rebuild locally. He similarly denigrated
the
> old 3 bridge S&S A's. He refered to them all as "57 bass [string] dogs",
and
> we students thought of giving him our own redesign of the Texas flag - a
> dog's head with 57 bass strings! (no offense, Texans!)
>   In my mind it's a tradeoff between a less powerful bass with a rather
> nasal low tenor in the model A and a bigger bass with "that third bridge"
(I
> don't know how else to describe it) sound in the tenor. I'm always tempted
> to replace the wound tenor trichords with wound bichords in these pianos
> when they're rebuilt, but although it helps with tuning (33% less wild
> string problems!) the fundamental tone deficiencies are still there. Like
> Steinway, M & H eventually replaced this sized model with a two bridge
> version before discontinuing then altogether.
>
> - Mark
---------------------------------------------------

I suspect Mark is correct.  However...

In most cases we can do more to clean up the scaling with the old
three-bridge designs than we can with the typical short piano designs using
only 26 bass unisons.  (Where did the notion come from anyway, that 26 was
the ideal number for bass unisons.  Or the 20 used in the A's, etc. -- not
good scaling practice.)

We do modify them a bit.  They are converted to bi-chords and the third
bridge is usually relocated.  With reasonable scaling and soundboard work
their bass/tenor crossovers are much smoother, requiring very little voicing
to even out, and they do not at all have a less powerful bass.

If no one else wants to rebuild these things, send them out to us.  We like
them.

Del