Hi Dave, and others. You see the thing is, when the RC&S case (or any other subject for that matter) is put forward in such a positve non confrontational way then the resulting discussion has great opportunity to result in an informative, rich, and educational exchange of ideas and views. We have folks of all sorts here with a wide variety of experience and equally variant levels of knowledge, skills, expertise in a broad range of piano allied arts. What may seem to be an off the wall or even absurd idea to one may be to another a stage of ponderment which if encouraged could result in the individual moving along a path of new knowledge, exciting, rewarding and valuable. On the other hand, quick jumps towards the confrontational simply force these same into a defensive mode and things get all mucked up real quick. It has always struck me that if someone wants truly to use the medium this list represents as an educational (teaching) tool... then that same would have no time to engage in some of the negative argumentation forms seen from time to time. Beating folks over the head with knowledge is at the very best counter productive. I would encourage one and all to take posts like your last two as examples as to how to keep a discussion on the bright and positive side. Something I personally have been increasingly impressed with by your posts of late in general fwiw. Cheers David RicB David Love writes: 'I should add that I have been party to a number of redesigns using RC&S methods with different variations in terms of rib layout, cutoffs, bridge configurations. From my perspective, I can't see doing it any other way in terms of the consistency of the outcomes. That isn't to say that there aren't still areas to explore within these designs to try and get just exactly the type of tone you want. The nice thing about doing it this way, however, is that it seems you have a much better chance of understanding how a design element might impact the tone when you can eliminate the variability of the crowing method itself. In the end, of course, it's still wood and you certainly can't eliminate all variability. You can only hope to reduce it as much as possible. We all have a mental picture of a certain type of tone that we think is the ideal. Whether that memory is based on anything real or not is another matter. Whether or not our conception of ideal tone is even something achievable without the enhancement of modern recording techniques is yet another matter. The other complicating factor is that our ideal changes and sometimes it changes from piano to piano as we listen and work on them to bring out the best from each. Unfortunately, there's no precise language to describe the subtlety of piano tone. I myself have tried to express some of these rather esoteric ideas on the list and other places without much success. Until there is, we're all just hunting and pecking, but it's not all in the dark. David Love davidlovepianos@comcast.net
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