Yes, I will be getting ahold of Anne for advice I am sure. In the meantime I remain totally fascinated with the sound that these old instruments are capable of... despite their age and all the obvious signs of problems. This one has a pinblock that really should be replaced.... but probably it will be repaired with the epoxy method. The soundboard has a few rather bad cracks... one in particular has pulled away from a couple of the ribs underneath on one side of the crack. The instrument has a very nice boomy response... very round sound really and quite pleasant. In this instrument the grain runs in a direction roughly 15 degrees off the bellyrail. Ribs are by and large about parallel to the bridge tho there are a couple cross ribs. There seems to be two types of cutoff bar systems. One rather obvious cutoff bar on the underside, and another curved one that you can see half of on the top side of the second photo I posted, tho you have to look pretty hard to spot it. I really do wish I could hear some thoughts about how soundboard design and these low tension scales match to get the kind of sound these things have. One has no way of knowing for sure... but if one imagines a significant basic quality degradation over 150 years and try to get an idea of how much nicer these may have sounded keeping the same basic overall sound spectrum in mind... its hard to see why everyone decided to copy Steinway in the end. I mean regardless of what one thinks of Steinways.. and I like them very much... how confining is that just <<one>> sound. Especially considering the bredth of other fine sounding piano instruments. I just want to understand more about how they created some of those sounds. Cheers RicB Hello Ric, Anne and Chris Acker, sometimes on this list, recently did a very nice job restoring a similar but younger (c.1880) Pleyel for an owner here in New Jersey. Albert.
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