Tom Merrill recently posted a memo on the CAUT list re the voicing of a Yamaha CFIII in a 280-seat recital hall that had bright acoustics. Wim Blees suggested that the problem might be the hall rather than the piano. Wim just might be right, or both things might be the problem. I would have to see and hear the hall before I could say. I'll leave the voicing of the piano to the Yamaha experts. However: With regard to the hall itself: There is a very simple test one can do with no fancy equipment whatever. Just walk into the center of the empty hall and smack your hands together one time. In a 280 seat hall, if you can hear the reverberation of your hand clap for more than a second, you are probably in trouble with the hall. Do the same thing from the stage, and listen. Hard parallel walls are always a problem. Curves or angles that form a focal point somewhere in the seating area are particularly bad. You can simply walk around the room, clapping your hands, and you can tell where the echo is coming from, or if that's any problem at all. In a hall no bigger than this, the echo is going to come back very quickly, and that means if the reverberation time is very long, the sound has bounced around many times, and that is what causes it to be garbled, or have that "in a barrel" sound. This all depends upon the size of the room. Reverberation times in large cathedrals can be up to seven or eight seconds, but that's another matter entirely. We are talking about a 280 seat recital hall here. There are commercial materials - panels - on the market that do a much better job than just hanging carpet on the walls. Acoustical Solutions, Inc. makes a variety of this stuff, and so do other companies. If parallel walls are a problem and you want to break up the repetitious wall-to-wall reverb without deadening the room, you can do that with diffusers. There are all sorts of things you can do, but at the same time, you don't want to over-do it. Just look up acoustical panels on the Internet, and you will find lots of this stuff. The right kind of panels put in the right places can work wonders for a small auditorium that is too bright. You do want to project the sound out, but you don't want too much of it bouncing from wall to wall, or coming back at you. Jim Ellis
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