Wound Trichords -- why 2 but not 3?

[Ron Nossaman]

>It's still a mystery to me, though.  Why, on the long bridge, are three an 
>abomination and not two?  Are three too loud for the rest of the scale, or 
>too thick for the hammers to hit all three properly, or is there too much 
>tension making the structure unstable or something?  Or is it related to 
>all the weird and inconsistent extra sounds that wound strings make, so 
>that tuning 3 of them together is just about impossible or something?

To blend tensions and volume into wrapped bichords or plain trichords, 
especially on the same bridge, wrapped trichords have to be very light, 
with very fine and delicate wrap. They're difficult for string winders to 
make and very difficult to match in a unison, so they don't tune well or 
blend well aurally within the scale. Bichords allow larger wrap, are easier 
to make, more likely to match, and blend better aurally. The transition 
from plain wire to wrapped should always be accompanied by a reduction in 
speaking lengths, either by positioning the bass/tenor break high enough in 
the scale, or with a transition bridge at the low tenor. So far, I haven't 
seen a scale including wrapped trichords that couldn't be made at least as 
"good", typically much better, with bichords, without the tuning and 
voicing problems. No contest.

Re-scaling and re-designing pianos with rebuild, I add a transition bridge 
to move the bass/tenor break up-scale to more like where it should have 
been in the first place. The result is typically a much better aural 
transition across the break.

Ron N