>My point was, and is, that we don't hear the inharmonicity in the >pianos. We hear tension, Z, and partials mix our choice of core >wire, tension, and break% gives. Inharmonicity comes in when you're >trying to tune across a transition with a big mismatch. I agree Ron N that the poor transition of inharmonicity and Z across the bass/treble break is perhaps the most obvious problem with many OEM scales. The usual tunability mess that is created when a designer decides to use covered bi-chords on the last few notes on the long bridge as a band aid fix for plummeting string tensions in the hockey-stick area is also one of my pet hates. Why design a piano with such an obviously poor work-around when a better solution would be to take a dash of courage, and design the piano with the break further up the scale, where it should have been in the first place? However, I believe that if inharmonicity is high enough it does effect our ability to easily determine the pitch of a note in the low bass, where in some scales the inharmonicity can be undesirably high. The obvious example of this would be a comparison between a piano with a very short bass scale and any concert instrument, when comparing the lowest minor third interval C to A on the keyboard. When listening to this interval on a long-bass scale the minor third will be well defined. But the same test on the shorter scaled bass will sound nothing like a real minor third. The higher inharmonicity of the short string scale will result in such pitch deviation between the fundamental frequency and the upper partials, that the identity of pitch will become a murky matter. Even in a rescaled D, pitch identity on the low bass can be improved. We had the opportunity to compare our modified model D bass scale to an OEM iteration first hand between 1993 to 1988. Of the two performance Ds at the ABC, one had our modified scale while the other remained factory standard. The piano with the OEM bass had been restrung also, but we decided to leave its string scale as factory standard, to cater for those pianists who might have had a preference for the standard bass tone. The pitch identity improvement of the lower inharmonicity scale was noticeable. This was noteworthy because the high inharmonicity scale was only about 3 cents sharp on the double octave harmonic of the low A, while the improved scale was under 2 cents on this note, and we could hear an improvement in the perceived pitch identity. Ron O. -- OVERS PIANOS - SYDNEY Grand Piano Manufacturers _______________________ Web http://overspianos.com.au mailto:ron at overspianos.com.au _______________________
This PTG archive page provided courtesy of Moy Piano Service, LLC