S&S D Duplex

[Bill Ballard]

At 11:48 PM -0500 11/15/02, Duplexdan@aol.com wrote:
>I'm going to try to be of further assistance to you in your search for
>answers to solving your "duplexophobic" condition.

Right, neighborly of you to call me problem "duplexophobic".

At 11:48 PM -0500 11/15/02, Duplexdan@aol.com wrote:
>The first thing I would suggest is to familiarize yourself with the duplex
>scale itself. Reading US Patents 126840 and 5736660  should help you
>to gain a technical grasp of the purposes, nature, and technology of 
>tuning duplex scales.

US Patents 126840 is  for a woodstove (as near as i can make it out) 
and 5736660 tells me how to use your tool, not the bug mystery here.

I'd be glad to. There's a Steinert B (sister of the Steinway M), 
which I restrung last year. I of course scratched individual aliquot 
locations onto the original plate finish, and returned to aliquots to 
their original place. Whereupon they were visually badly out of line. 
I cut a cross-section of the aliquots, tilted to 20º into a strip of 
brass. I used that tool (which unfortunately doesn't straddle the 
wire as yours does) to even up the curves. I still have the tool.

The owner (actually the music dept head of the local private school 
owing the piano) has said recently that the treble seems to drop off 
in quality. (I had voiced NY Steinway hammers on the assumption 
gathered from earlier experience with her, and given the difference 
between my taste and what i perceived hers to be, I wasn't going to 
make any comments about quality of sound in the 6th and 7th octaves.)

So I have a chance to find out if a keyblock has loosened up allowing 
the strike point to wander,  whether the hammer crowns need to be 
relaxed, or whether this is a case which starts with out-to-lunch 
duplex tuning, and ends up after duplex tuning with a back from the 
dead miracle in size of sound.

What would you suggest for harmonic relationships between to speaking 
and rear duplex lengths on this Steinway M copy? (And I realize, what 
would you care to donate in this situation?)

At 11:48 PM -0500 11/15/02, Duplexdan@aol.com wrote:
>I prefer to call the interest in the least 25 years more like a 
>tidal wave that has
>been building around the world.  Virtually all the Kawais and yamahas  and
>other pianos coming out of the Orient have duplex scale clones including the
>Boston. In Europe the Fazioli factory is eminently engaged in perfecting the
>duplex scale characteristics and tuning.
>
>Here are a few pianos that have endorsed the duplex scale in their design:
>Baldwin, Bosendorfer, Boston, Estonia Fazioli, Hardman, Heimlisch, Kawai,
>Knabe, Mason & Hamlin, Nakamura, Rieger-Kloss, Steinert, Steinway, Weber,
>yamaha, young Chang.

Certainly, these pianos are equipped with the aliquot/rear duplex 
system. But I'd be a little cautious in speaking for them, to call 
the appearance of the rear duplex system, and endorsement of the 
original idea. It could as easily be an idea copied without much 
research and then continued as an arbitrary feature.

At 11:48 PM -0500 11/15/02, Duplexdan@aol.com wrote:
>So far there
>has never been any significant test undertaken that disproves the value of
>the design, only duplexophobia, which is understandably a conservative "prove
>it to me" viewpoint.

I'm not interested in the lack of a test which would disprove. At 
this point I'm more worried by the lack of any significant tests 
whatsoever. (If any of you can draw any conclusions from Dan's bar 
graphs published in his original article of 5/95, p. 26, I look 
forward to hearing them.) Sarah Fox offers us an opportunity.

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

"No one builds the *perfect* piano, you can only remove the obstacles 
to that perfection during the building."
     ...........LaRoy Edwards, Yamaha International Corp
+++++++++++++++++++++