DC Study - was Another heater bar without a control...

[Farrell]

I should think such an experiment would be quite easy to set up actually. Take two pianos in one room that has a wide seasonal relative humidity (RH) swing. Monitor room RH and piano pitch for a year or two. Verify that both pianos react very close pitch-wise during the year. If they don't - get different pianos. Once you have two pianos that pitch-drift very close together, install a proper DC system on one. Monitor room RH and piano pitch for a year or two.

That would likely be enough to get some usable results.

If you wanted to take it to court, then you would need to get a statistician in there to determine an appropriate sample size, etc. You would likely need several (many!) pianos and perhaps several rooms with different RH cycles and maybe more years of monitoring.

Terry Farrell
  
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "G GRAVINA" <ggravina@ix.netcom.com>
To: <pianotech@ptg.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 6:45 AM
Subject: DC Study - was Another heater bar without a control...


> Matt W wrote:
> 
> >I would be willing to participate in data collection with you 
> >Jerry.  Although I sound pretty biased against this hardware,  I can be at 
> >once skeptical and at the same time open-minded.  In my opinion, any study 
> >should involve at least one pair of pianos - one for the hardware and an 
> >"untreated" piano as a control.  The pianos should also be left untouched, 
> >so as to avoid any data contamination through tampering.  Unfortunately, I 
> >don't know of anywhere where this condition exists, except maybe for a 
> >store with a storage facility, which might involve rental and storage fees.
> >
> >Gotta keep it interesting
> >
> >Matt
> 
> Folks,
> 
> If one were to set up such a study, what other parameters, controls, 
> frequency of data collection, length of study, etc., should be considered?
> 
> Jerry Gravina, RPT
> Babylon, NY 
>