Touchweight Metrology Question

[Bill Ballard]

At 7:36 PM -0400 5/19/02, A440A@AOL.COM wrote:
>Agreed, it would be hard to tell, however,  trying to play a Chopin etude or
>a Rachmaninoff concerto on a keyboard with an extra two to four grams of
>inertial resistance will certainly be noticeable to most highly skilled
>pianists.  The effect of the mass will be increased as speed of acceleration
>goes up,  so a piano that is easy to play slowly will start "hardening up" as
>one attempts to play it harder or faster.

I was assuming we'd put the error in the BW, whose resistance is 
static, and doesn't react dynamically.

>I don't know about that, his recordings sound pretty shallow and brittle to
>me. I heard his piano before the factory "restored" it,  it sounded like a
>tin can.

We all know about making hamburgers out of sacred cows, but this is a 
case of making a sacred cow out of rancid hamburger.

>How much nicer the sound could have been will never be known, but
>that is the price of neurotic artistry.

Not with tiny acorns for hammers and shank pinning so loose that 
"they literally danced their way up to the string" (according to Joe 
Bisceglie).

At 12:29 AM +0200 5/20/02, Richard Brekne wrote:
>  Knowing then that any uneveness in BW
>is due to friction and leverage variations allows you to look more closely in
>those directions to further even the BW. You can get pretty darned close to
>having it both ways in the end.

There's plenty of room for further exploration. One thing I've always 
wanted to do (but never took the time out to) is to hang an entire 
set of hammers on one shank, record the DW/UW, and then plot the SBR 
against the known SWs (well, hammer weights plus shank weight). Or 
inversely, take a group of shanks with the same shank weight, and run 
the same test with a constant hammer weight. There may be a certain 
fuzziness in the system of measurements based on weights at the end 
of levers, but notwithstanding, this metrology is so much more 
revealing than simple DW/UW.

Bill Ballard RPT
NH Chapter, P.T.G.

Reality is the first casualty of technology
     ...........NPR Commentator Daniel Schorr
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