Frank Weston wrote: > > Many old soundboards have held up well because they were made from the > best wood (wood that may no longer be available), further, great > attention was given to properly seasoning that wood. I read somewhere > that years back, the most important job at Steinway, one always reserved > for a family member, was the selection and purchase of wood. > > Today, the wood used in most soundboards is selected from faster growing > species, not as much high quality wood is always available, and economic > pressures preclude expensive and time consuming seasoning methods. (I > expect a little argument on this point from the manufacturer's reps) This is certainly part of the problem. Whether we like it or not our forests will never be what they were 100 years ago. At least not in our lifetimes—we’ve done far too much damage to them. Neither will wood processing—the priorities of the wood industry have changed far too much for that. This doesn't mean we have to give up on the piano, though. If you believe that the piano is still an evolving instrument (as I do) then you can appreciate that there are many avenues still open to us—both with materials available to us and perhaps even more, with innovative design. Soundboards can be—have been—developed that can cope with modern life and at the same time provide better sound than their predecessors. Even wood soundboards. I’m far from giving up on our Sitka spruce soundboards. > Bottom line: today's soundboards may in general be less durable than > those of 100 years ago. The method of finishing is of little > consequence to long term durability. I don’t agree that the soundboards we’re putting in pianos today are any less durable than those installed in pianos 100 years ago. I fully expect them to have a useful (musical) life that is at least as long even though I’ll not be around to prove it. > To add more fuel to the fire: Why do a lot of old soundboards that have > seen coal heat, high humidity, low humidity, and in general a lot of > abuse endure without a complaint, when new soundboards fitted with > humidity control systems frequently show signs of deterioration within a > few years? I don’t necessarily agree that they’ve survived without complaint. Again I must say that we’re trying to use the exceptions to try to prove the rule. The practice of compression crowning soundboards is not as precise as many factories would like us to believe. There are a lot of potential variables. Individual soundboards survive because they were bellied in such a manner that exposure to normal atmospheric conditions did not cause them to exceed their structural capabilities. I suspect—though again, can’t prove—that these boards had the serendipitous combination of particularly resilient wood plus being bellied at the high end of the relative moisture content scale. In the case of those soundboards finished with shellac, of course, you are right: the finish didn’t have anything to do with the soundboards longevity. (Sorry. Just couldn’t resist that!) As an aside, I once repaired a soundboard in a Japanese built piano that was located in a home in the Nevada high desert. In the winter, with a forced air heating system going and with no moisture being added to the room—I didn’t measure the relative humidity in the room, but it was DRY!—the soundboard had developed the mother of all “compression ridges.” It formed an inverted “V” along a glue line running down the middle of the board. It had pulled away from the ribs for a distance of about 25 to 50 mm on either side of the glue line. It had forced itself up so that I could measure a gap of about 10 to 12 mm between the top of the rib and the bottom of the soundboard. I have no idea what the moisture content must have been in this soundboard when it was bellied, but it must have been close to oven dry. My point is that manufacturers don’t—can’t, really—always control this process as well as they might like to. It is very difficult to accurately control the relative humidity of a room, even a wood conditioning room. And it’s very difficult to control the moisture content of wood all that precisely. It can be done, but it’s not easy. The meters used to measure EMC usually don’t even read below 6% or so. As long as manufacturers depend on the practice of compression crowning soundboards, there is going to be a high failure rate. “Failure” in the sense of soundboards with compression ridges and cracks, not necessarily musically. The two don’t always go hand in hand. Regards, ddf
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