Hmmm. This assumes that there is only one correct, or ideal, tuning for each piano. It also presupposes that a good ETD tuner isn't using his or her ears to tweak things. For example I tuned a Hamilton Studio this afternoon using Tunelab 4.0 in which I have utmost confidence to produce a very fine tuning ... but I didn't love some of the octaves across the tenor break. Since this is a church piano and these octaves are the location of most left hand notes in hymn playing, I moved a few notes to make the octaves absolutely beatless (at 6:3) and adjusted accordingly. Not wanting to mess up the nice curve going up, or retune the whole tenor and treble, I simply pushed the bass down a cent or two, here and there. I didn't have to do that, no one would notice at the church would notice a difference .... but I did, so I made it as nice for my ear as possible. My point is that your proposed aural/ETD contest, for me, misses the point. A skilled tuner must produce a fine tuning appropriate for the piano. The method of "getting there" is wholly irrelevant. One note, however: If there are still any "purist", i.e., snobbish and ill-informed, aural tuners out there who eschew (Gesundheit!) all computer-assisted tuning I WOULD challenge those folks to a tune-off on a crap spinet, say, in a noisy environment at the end of a long day when you've got a bad head cold and you really want to munch peanuts while tuning. Alan Barnard "God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless." Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, CINCPAC WWII -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech_ptg.org/attachments/20081219/21a0b295/attachment.html>
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