I am regulating an action out of a 4' 7" 1973 G. Steck Aeolian. (Isn't there some kind of law against manufacturing pianos that are shorter than they are wide?) I listened to the voicing on the piano prior to action removal by going up and down the keyboard. The middle tenor and up sounded like a piano. The middle bass and below sounded like a typical spinet bass. The low tenor sounded like loud rubber bands, and the upper bass was very, very weak and ultra spinet-sounding (both effects increasing as you approached the break). The bass/tenor break on this piano is tonally by far the worst example of a bad break I have ever heard (by some large multiple). Should I be suspecting a loose bridge or two here or some other structural failure? Or is it possible that this piano was actually designed/built this way with the observed tonal characteristics? Is the observed blubbery-rubber-band sound from the low tenor simply an extreme example of the effects of lowering the tension of the strings in that area to get the desired pitch (hockey-stick-bridge and all that). I read references to pianos such as the Steinway B with a poor tenor/bass break - I gotta admit that my ear is simply not experienced to pick on that design as having a poor break - I do hear it in many small pianos, but not in such a big one (I'm not saying it's not there, I just haven't had the ear training to hear it). But my question here is am I observing the same phenomena, only magnified by a poor-design factor of 10,000? And why the super poor sounding upper bass (way worse than most spinets - super-nasal sounding and very weak)? Just trying to learn and figger this stuff out. Terry Farrell
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