[pianotech] Steinway A Bass String Rescaling

[William Truitt]

"we don't hear the inharmonicity in pianos. ... too much emphasis is still
being put on absolute inharmonicity values in scaling."  So Ron, this meants
then, that you would favor a scale with no inharmonicity, right?  (I KNOW
that I'm being bad, but I can't help myself...)

Will

-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf
Of Ron Nossaman
Sent: Saturday, May 23, 2009 5:27 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] Steinway A Bass String Rescaling

William Truitt wrote:
> I don't think that an "acceptable" range of inharmonicity can ever be
> determined objectively, nor is that necessary or even desirable.  That's a
> bit like asking "What's the best color red?"  You are asking people for a
> judgment (perhaps based on certain criteria, but also shaped by
> preferences).  Why would an absolute standard be a good thing?  I think it
> is great that we have many different pianos based on different
inharmonicity
> curves as well as other criteria.  That being said, many of us would agree
> that certain pianos sound better than others, and this can be correlated
to
> the amount of inharmonicity and the smoothness of the curve (amongst a
> multitude of other things that we cannot separate from inharmonicity, as
Ron
> points out in his curmudgeonly fashion :-) ).  

My point was, and is, that we don't hear the inharmonicity in 
the pianos. We hear tension, Z, and partials mix our choice of 
core wire, tension, and break% gives. Inharmonicity comes in 
when you're trying to tune across a transition with a big 
mismatch.


>We do understand a hell of a
> lot more about inharmonicity and the other factors involved in string
> scaling than we did 50 years ago, and that is being put to use in scaling
> and rescaling pianos today.  Do we know everything there is to know?  Not
> likely.  
> 
> Will

Yes, we do know a lot more, except that too much emphasis is 
still being put on absolute inharmonicity values in scaling.
Ron N