At 11:06 AM +1100 12/9/01, Ron Overs wrote: >Indeed Ron, there's nothing like reducing a 1.4 mm typical lowest >note core wire (on say a 185 cm grand) down to 2.25 mm [typo: 1.25 >= mwg 22.5 JD ] and double covering it, often with more copper mass >to further lower inharmonicity and and improve what I would describe >as an 'openness' of tone (on that same 185 cm grand). It will also >move the % break up to improve tuning stability of a bass singles. >Furthermore, the smaller core wire will make the back scale act as >if its longer, on account of the reduced stiffness of the back scale >wire segment. This can be a real plus when working on short pianos >with a 100 mm back scale bass. Yes, this sounds very similar to my thoughts on the question as regards the 6' piano, which is a sort of "transitional size". It's interesting that Bechstein's Model A (185 cm. post 1900) was the point where Bechstein opted for 12 d/c and broke away from the religion. Blüthner goes much further; whereas Bechstein has originally A1 131.1 cm. 23.5 + 65/185 the Blüthner Styles 5 and 7 (5'10" and 6'3") have something like A1 125.8 cm. 20 + 80/175 A1 138.7 cm. 20 + 80/170 On their very acceptable Style 4 5' grand, A1 is on a #18.5 core and the gauge numbers actually get thinner towards the bass. Blüthner was an extremist. > Even when rescaling a D, we reduce the 1.7 mm diameter core to 1.5 >mm and increase the copper mass somewhat, the tone is to more >pleasing to my ear. When it comes to concert pianos, there are special factors. On a D, I reduce the core to 26, and not 25, and also add a bit more copper as you do. When I attended the inaugural concert in Wales for the first Stuart piano in the Western Hemisphere, I was more impressed with the inability of his great long bass to make itself heard in the hall and the general feeling that I was listening to an extremely old Bechstein, than I was by his very airy-fairy pre-concert lecture in which he demonstrated the ability of the piano to sustain and complained that "all the sound in a Steinway goes to the middle", whatever he meant by that. When I questioned him closely about his aims in the design of the bass, he was at a loss to find anything useful to say at all. Sustaining power and the ability to separate each note from the others in the sound soup instead of sending them all "to the middle" seemed to be his selling points. When after he concert I spoke to the pianist and mentioned that from where I sat the bass was very faint, I was told they had had to change the planned program because of the hall's acoustics, which absorbed the bass. A friend of mine who regularly plays in the hall had not heard about this. It's hard to make the bass of a concert grand "unpleasing to the ear", unless you're Bösendorfer of course, but it is certainly important that the piano should be audible in staccato and legato playing throughout the range and that the attack and the low partials should be optimized. >I suspect a great majority of manufacturers choose to single cover >the singles for cost savings. I doubt it nowadays. The cost of copper is very low and it takes less than a minute longer to make a d/c string than a s/c. In the past, the ratio of material costs to labour costs was very different and the "weight" of the strings was a factor for unscrupulous makers, at least in England. However, this never led to the use of s/c strings rather than d/c. I think it's more a question of the increased importance of the extremes of the scale as music moved from the classical age through to the Liszt/Busoni age and people began to see that these notes were actually being used by a few players and needed to sound purer. JD
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