Laminated Soundboard Panels

[gordon stelter]

Terry. I think that cheap mahogany was used in these,
much cheaper than decent spruce. And that, combined
with the stability of the laminated panel made it seem
worthwhile to produce, according to the marketers.
Story and Clark "Church" ianos were built this way,
and are acceptable to the average ear of today, but
not musical in the classic sense of the term.
     Thump

--- Donald Mannino <donmannino@comcast.net> wrote:

---------------------------------
Terry,

- The laminated panels used in most pianos that have
them are cheaper tomake because of the low price of
the wood used.  Very low grade corewood has usually be
covered with slightly nicer looking veneer. Making up
a soundboard of spruce, even low grade spruce, is more
work andwastes much more of the raw wood.
- I agree with you that there is no reason that
laminated panels can'tproduce sound as well as
traditional panels.  The few efforts atmaking high
quality laminated soundboards have shown this, but
they havealways been a marketing flop.  The piano
market is awfullyconservative about changing
materials.
- These things boil down to the manufacturer's
original reason for usinga laminated panel.  If the
original goal was to make a soundboardthat was cheaper
and "wouldn't crack," then the results willgenerally
be a poor sound.  Especially so since the so
called'designers' at these companies often made no
change at all to the ribscale to match the stiffer
board.  Those companies which made theeffort to make a
quality piano with laminated soundboards succeeded
tosome degree (at least tonally), but then the cost
was not that much lowerthan solid spruce and the
marketing stigma prevented the pianos fromdoing well.

Don Mannino

At 04:07 PM 2/3/2004, you wrote:
Laminatedsoundboard panels got a bad reputation from
cheap, poorly designed andmanufactured spinets, et.
al. of the 1950s, 1960s, etc. I've got a
couplequestions about these.
 
Was there anything wrong with the panelsin these
pianos, or was is only that the rest of the piano was
terrible,so the panel earned the same reputation as
the rest of the piano, or wasthe panel itself poorly
designed and/or made. I know some of them hadmahogany
as the outer laminate - I don't know how thick that
laminate was- perhaps there were panel density
problems. Was the rest of the panelmade out of Sitka
or similar spruce?
 
I'm just trying to understand if aquarter-sawn
laminated Sitka Spruce panel made today is
incorporated intoa well-designed and built piano, I
presume it will perform as well as asolid spruce panel
(maybe better when you consider tuning stability
andlongevity).
 
Also, why, in those cheap little spinetsof yesteryear,
did they use laminated panels on the soundboard? Isn't
itmore expensive to go through all the work of
laminating up a panelcompared to a solid panel? Maybe
it is because they used old wood fromindustrial
warehouse pallets in the panels?
 
TerryFarrell


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