Dear Christopher I am one of the contract techs at Oklahoma City University. When we became an All Steinway school the inventory included 78 1098's. Fortunately we also got a new music building with the pianos which includes a humidity control system throughout the building. It is amazing what 38 million will buy. The pianos were purchased before the building was completed and they were placed in storage for a couple of years. When they were delivered we did a lot of 25 to 40 cent pitch raises. The next semester we still had green pianos which required 15 to 20 cent raises. On the third go around the pianos were fairly stable. We had the following issues on a somewhat consistent basis. 1. Keys clicking against the sostenuto rail where it is jointed to go around the plate strut. The keys are mortised but not deep enough. (solution deepen mortise with pocket knife solution permanent) 2. Most if not all needed the strings seated down on the bridges to eliminate the false beats especially in the high treble. Some bending of bridge pins was required in a couple of instances to give consistent string termination on all three unisons. The newer models don't seem to have quite the issues with string rendering as the older ones. Steinways suggestion is to apply Pro Lube to the understring felt to assist in string movement. (This also works on a lot of older pianos that may have a bit of rust on the felt side of the string such as Kawai's with the blue felt vintage) One semester the humidity control went on the blink and everything went sharp. The 1098 does not respond nearly as to being lowered in pitch as much as it tolerates being brought up in pitch. All in all they have a pretty good overall tone but I am not sure it reflects the purchase price. Norman Cantrell, RPT Just gearing up for another semester break 1098 round of fun! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut_ptg.org/attachments/20081203/1e7b2486/attachment.html>
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