Dave, I was wondering if everything else was exactly the same. When trying to determine if changes actually are improvements part of the problem is isolating the change you're interested in from all the other changes. For instance, you rebuild a piano and install the new super duper platinum wire. The piano sounds better. Is it because of the wire or the 20 other things you changed at the same time? If you don't change anything but the wire, then if it sounds better how do you know it wouldn't have sounded just as good (or better) if you had used the gold wire instead of the platinum? The same applies to this (or other) wapinizations. Did you take a properly functioning bridge termination of a conventional type and replace it with a wapin, or did you replace a bridge with indented caps and indented and/or loose bridge pins? Did you surface the bridge at all? Is the bearing exactly the same as it was before? Are the strings the same as the ones that were there before? Was the capo resurfaced (since I assume the piano was restrung)? Were the hammers surfaced, since the grooves might not line up exactly with the new string locations? Etc., etc. Questions like these have so far kept me from becoming a wapin believer. I've seen and heard some wapin pianos that sounded good. However, in my opinion they didn't sound any better than those pianos would have sounded if they had been properly rebuilt with conventional bridge terminations. Frankly I'm sceptical about the merits of this system. Until I can hear some examples in which the bridge terminations can be directly compared with other variables held constant I probably will remain so. Phil F Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 11:52:14 -0600 From: "David M. Porritt" <dm.porritt@verizon.net> Subject: Re: Wapin bridge Phillip: In this case the bridge was not recapped. Frankly - I'm restricted by the license agreement - from saying much more about the procedure. dave On 1/28/2002 at 5:17 PM Phillip L Ford wrote: >Dave, >I'm not familiar with the mechanics of a Wapin installation. Is the bridge >recapped and/or bearing (re)set? > >Phil F
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