[pianotech] who pays?

[David Love]

It's a little out of context.  The question is the criticism of Steinway for
marketing themselves the best way they know how using a strategy that they
think will be most effective.  I personally think that their "Stein-was"
strategy is largely driven by the heavily vocal design change Steinway can
do no right group.  Steinway clearly has a market share in rebuilding their
pianos to protect--i.e., they make money there.  Their greatest (or you can
also argue weakest) asset is that the pianos that come out of their facility
will be faithful to the current Steinway designs.  I've seen several factory
rebuilds that were fine and some that weren't.  The same can be said of
independent rebuilders.  

We all pick and choose the kind of promotional angle we think will serve us
the best whether it's that we employ design changes seeking improvement or
that we remain faithful to the original concept.  That Steinway promotes
themselves as the best avenue to rebuild vintage Steinway pianos should come
as no surprise.  If they were Nossaman, Erwin or Love pianos, if we are not
being disingenuous, we would be making the same claim and probably by
somewhat bothered by people making design changes.     

David Love
www.davidlovepianos.com


-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Ron Nossaman
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2012 11:58 AM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] who pays?

On 10/19/2012 1:03 PM, David Love wrote:
>  Would
> you want someone stretching strings over every rebuild/redesign that 
> you've done and drawing conclusions about the rest of your work based 
> on that one piano?

That was exactly the situation with all of us who had a piano at that
showcase. The difference is that most of the people looking at our pianos
had only ever seen that one example of our work, where a lot more of us have
seen more than one example of the Steinway basement rebuild.

Ron N