Terry: I have experienced the same phenomenon. Recently I restrung a baby grand, and was appalled to find that there seemed to be no improvement in the tone with the new strings! I compared the hammer produced tone to a plucked tone, and the plucked tone gave the "new string" tone I was expecting. I had to harden up the old hammers quite a bit to get the piano to sound like it had been restrung. I will be replacing the hammers in the piano this fall. I too was at a loss to understand how these old hammers could be so soft and poor at producing a tone, unless that's the way they came from the factory. Patrick Poulson, RPT
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