In a message dated 4/2/2001 7:14:17 PM Central Daylight Time, RNossaman@KSCABLE.com writes: << It may be counterintuitive to you, but it makes mechanical sense to me. >> Ron: What, then, is the mechanical "sense". Why, then, does a bridge pinned shallowly, or a bridge pinned into a cap that is too thick not reaching the bridge trunk, have entirely different tonal characteristics from a bridge pinned into the trunk deeply. This is audible and certainly measurable with the proper tools; its audibility is not intuition or invention on my part; what accounts for it then? Is bridge pinning just a traditional way of securing the string over the bridge harking back centuries and having no other physical purpose than you purport? You say that you can see no other reason; is argument by the claiming the absence of positive proof a positive argument? Is this just a bit too legalistic? If one can truly claim audible improvement in the tone character of a piano through manipulation of the bridge termination, are you truly so anal :) that you require some harder science in order to accept that there is something going on here, but we don't know what it is yet, Mr. Jones? Still :) We can know a lot of the science but not all of it and derive speculative conclusions about the nature of things which may or may not turn out to be true. Intuitive thinking is not simply wanting things to be a certain way, or creative imagining. How do you know, in the absence of other information, that there is NOT energy transfer through the pin? Since either speculation is devoid of hard proof, then either may be right. MY intuition is that vibrational energy is passing down the length of the pin to whatever depth it goes through whatever material it goes through at whatever grain orientation of that material with whatever efficiency and with whatever impedance effects. Miniscule defined or undefined; audible, uncontrovertible. Pull a pin (or better, drive a pin just to that point where it is doing its mechanical thing holding the string in place and listen to the tonal characteristics; drive it a bit deeper and listen again, etc. I hear a difference. Really I do; I'm not making it up. I hope that this isn't one of those things that'll appear in the Journal of Irreproducible Results. This is absolutely fascinating, Ron. I hope that you know that I have been grinning since the beginning of this thread. Also, I can't seem to read my drawings but a large whoops is in order; of course the string contact moves down the pin as the pin goes to vertical; didn't I say that? Oh well. With respect, Paul
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