At 21:41 -0500 6/7/10, William Monroe wrote: > The CF soundboard is VERY thin. It has the appearance of CF on top >and has a spruce veneer on the underside, and the CF with the spruce >veneer was probably on the order of 1/8" thick or less. According to the information on their site the _optional_ veneer is maple and not spruce. That would make sense, since a spruce veneer would need to be quite thick in order not to look grey by translucence. Though the maple is denser its mass can be less than that of the necessary thickness of spruce. The veneering, including the glue, will add to the mass of the board without much increasing its stiffness, so it would be better to forget the cosmetic aspect until they discover a cream isotope of carbon! I disguised the nature of my first non-wood soundboard in order simply to keep the secret from prying eyes, but I did it by faking a wood grain with lacquer, and that was a complete success. As to the (again optional?) soundboard bars, these are going to add a huge increase the mass of the board by a large percentage while increasing the stiffness only in one direction. Theoretically, I would think, this can do nothing but harm. The traditional soundboard has bars in order to equalize the stiffness of the board across the grain with the natural stiffness along the grain in an approach to an isotropic plate. I presume the carbon fibre board is roughly isotropic without any additions, so adding bars seems to me a gross concession to cosmetics. On Steingraeber's Facebook site there is a good recording of Franz Liszt's Csárdás Obstiné, which I have listened to quite carefully a couple of times. Hard to judge all the qualities of a piano from such a show-off piece but it sounds to me as if the bass is far too heavy (like a Bösendorfer) and muddy, and also as if the tone quality is far less nuanced than one would expect from a good Steinway. If I were advertising my piano through this medium, I would not choose such a piece of Liszt to show off its qualities. A well-chosen piece of Schumann of the same length would display all its varied colours and be a great deal less annoying. JD
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