Steinway Sustain

[Newton Hunt]

Hi TOny,

André's approach is the correct one to get the most out of this piano.  New hammers
may or may not help but putting various hammers you may have around the shop on the
piano will give you some indication if this is a valid approach.

Regulation is essential. Consider that you are preparing a racing car for a race.  It
has to be as perfect as you can make it in order to win.  In our trade "winning" is a
happy pianist and a glorious performance.

After the perfect regulation (which has to include making the hammer weight centered
over the center of the shank), filing then you must fit the hammers to the strings in
that the strike line of the crown must be perfectly perpendicular to the sides of the
hammers.  Check the mating by lifting the hammer up to the strings with a hook or
pushing up on the bottom of the jack and preventing letoff, and pluck the strings to
see if one or more of the strings is too high by which are open.  Lift the strings
and check the mating again, tune, do it all over again until it is perfect.

Tune your octaves carefully to get the loudest octave possible, each and every one,
and get the unisons a perfect as you can but keep them "open" or so that there is not
phase cancellation because of the unison being ever so slightly out of tune.

Now you can voice.  I think you will find that many of your voicing problems have
disappeared.

1 mm letoff is good for one performance but there is such a narrow margin of safety
it will have to be carefully checked for each performance.  A little change in
humidity and there will be blocking, double striking or premature striking.

That is the good news.  The bad news is that that there are problems with most pianos
having what is called the "killer octave" which is an area of the scale where the
soundboard is not stiff enough to generate good sustain and/or power.  This is a
defect in the design of the board, bridge, rib layout and there is not much that you
can do about it without a complete rebuild.  ALthough there is one experiment you can
try and that is to hang some weights to the center of the poor area to see if you can
stiffen the board response.  

First try the traditional approach which may well give you exceptional results.

As for the Ronisch, send me the core diameter, unwound ends (end of copper to
terminal point), speaking length, wrap diameter(s) and step length if double wound. 
I can then compare the inharmonicity, tension, breaking percentage point, power and a
couple of other things to "acceptable" standards.  If you send me all the data I can
rescale the bass, for a small fee, and send you a set of winding specs.

Have a great weekend.

		Newton