Jim Busby wrote: > That was exactly my point, or the point I was trying to ask about with > this article. But if this has been discussed a dozen times on Pianotech > I shouldn’t have posted it w/o looking back. Ok, I get it. The break% thing is what we discussed on pianotech, and break% and elongation are definitely tied together. The farther you stretch (elongate) a string, the higher it's break%, and the less reactive it gets to minute difference in stretch (elongation). > While Fenner indeed talks about break % and the usual stuff, this notion > of length alone as “string elongation”, aside from any tension issue in > tuning stability, had me wondering… I’m studying it on my own (well, > with Vince Mrykalo) and think it is an issue worth looking at. "Elongation" is misleading here. The fact that a longer string will change tension less with a given length change than will a shorter string with the same length increase strikes me as pretty obvious. Balancing the change differences with excess waste length may make the low break% string more stable, but it'll still sound like a low break% string. In the June 1992 PTJ, Fenner says that the shorter the back scale, the more stable the tuning, because the soundboard is constrained from moving. He also states that the longer the back scale, the harder the tuning is to accomplish, and the less stable it is. In practical application, I find this not to be the case. He also says soundboard rise and fall is primarily responsible for pianos going out of tune, and I also find this not to be the case. So to explore this stuff, we need to start with some clear basic premise, and take it apart for inspection and further clarification to establish it's validity, one premise at t time. Ron N
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