Son of the Return of Scale =

[Clark]

Hi Ron,

Regarding my assessment of Wornum's 'Royal Patent Equal Tension', you
wrote

> At what number of decimal points does something become a "true" something?

In this case it's a matter of name and intent - Wornum explicitly wanted
this feature and applied it to every plain string.

Scaling absolutely equal tension for different guages does result in
sectionally stepped lengths between guages and a bumpy inharmonicity
curve is predicted. I'll be looking forward to your measurements.

> You could build a 5' piano with the same scale as a 9' piano in
> the last two octaves or so with no problems

Wornum's solution to this in his Pocket and Imperial grands was to
extend the range of the larger instrument, their plain string scales
then would be identical. In fact, one could build a modern 5' piano with
a 4 1/2 octave compass and pass it off as a (treble) concert grand.

Now, we're approaching the idea from different perspectives; yours is
the more realistic one, since mine's a little esoteric. ;)

> Was the Young Chang an attempted technological time machine?

They could have done worse. Loads of ideas have been implemented in
pianos, and not all of those that survive in modern instruments have
done so for being optimal or convincing. The topic of this thread looks
like one of them now that we have better means of scaling.

Cheers,

Clark