Hi Mark. This is exactly the kind of point I tried to underline. Scaling priorities clearly vary according to the kind of sound results the piano is meant to have. A "correct" scaling is much less a matter of following any one given set of rules as it is how well the designer succeeded in establishing the kind of sound she was attempting. We loose track of this kind of thing too often me thinks in all our enthusiasm for new knowledge, much of which may be new for us as individuals but is old trail for the industry at large. I suppose an analogy can be drawn with tuning stretch preferences and / or temperaments. A good tuning is one in which the tuner accomplished well what she set out to do. Not any particular bearing model or stretch amount. Cheers RicB John Delacour wrote: > > If by modifying the scale you can achieve less audible breaks, then > that is clearly an improvement in anybody's book Not so fast...When Mason & Hamlin first moved to Haverhill, MA, the model BB's that they were building included several unisons of wound bichords in the tenor. This feature was dropped soon after and the scale reverted to plain trichords in this section. When I expressed my surprise I was told that "While [the rescaling] was technically correct it was not embraced by some of the end customers". I heard from another source that one or more of the cellists at the BSO had objected to the timbre of the wound bichords when playing chamber music. - Mark Dierauf
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