Clarification

[Yardbird47@aol.com]

Bob Hohf rote, 1/25:
<< Here I am not referring to "snitch(ing) a taste of the piano's qualities"
but putting the piano through its paces; working the piano directly for the
purpose of discovering what it is and is not capable of.   This involves
mixing a certain amount of playing skill with technical understanding in
order to relate cause and effect to what you hear and feel from the
instrument.>>

I don't doubt that you're mixing a certain amount of playing skill with
technical understanding. But most skilled pianists find these two hard to
combine in the same consciousness, if they even have the latter. Does this
technical understanding itself constitute a step away from the primary
source, ie. not the piano itself but your experience of it solely as a
pianist.
Sounds like you had piano lessons as a kid. I had clarinet lessons. I'd love
to play anything faster than a lento on the piano. But all of this
enveloping, transporting piano sound would tell me nothing about how mass,
leverage and friction play out in real  (rather than intuited) terms, or for
that matter how tall the backchecks stand.

<<David, your system is very complex.  By the time you take your
measurements, plug them into your computer, and analyze the output, you have
created a >secondary< source on the instrument.>>

It's suprisingly simple for what illuminates. Most people take a downweight,
a few an upweight. Take a strike weight and a front weight and you have a
profile of how the action is hung, telling you where mass or leverage may be
out of line. We can all do a mechanical regulation, and get a reasonable
sound out a reasonable set of hammers. But we can do both of these until the
cows come home, and if still won't touch how the action is humg. I call it
tuning up mass and leverage. A 23-note survey plus data entry is about two
hours time and I consider it time well spent.

What's a primary source? If you're a pianist, it's sitting down and playing
the piano. If you're the technician, it's reading the action with real
measurements. Two hats maybe, but I agree with you, we need all the hats we
can get.