Tuning Steinway Verticals

[Kent Swafford]

On Thursday, September 18, 2003, at 08:59  AM, Fred Sturm wrote:

> But the really eerie thing for me is the way they behave during pitch 
> changes.


> I've only run across two or three non-Steinway 1098's (and whatever 
> the console model number is) that behave this way. Bizarre!

I find that Steinway verticals and Kimball verticals share the same 
bizarre pitch-raising behavior.

In RCT terms, I use standard techniques (but with overpull adjusted to 
-3%) from A0 to A4. At A4 I read the % overpull box, calculate 60% of 
that figure, switch to Fine Tune mode and enter the 60% of overpull 
number into the offset box. This provides a much smaller than normal 
overpull above A4 that seems to be more useful than letting Pitch Raise 
mode calculate an overpull automatically.

I haven't seen mentioned that in the top 2 sections, 1098s often 
produce bizarre readings in the display of ETDs, with held notes 
appearing to "change" pitch drastically (perhaps 30 cents!?) as read in 
the ETD display. This could be why pitch raise mode doesn't work so 
hot; RCT, at least, could be making pitch raise calculations 
automatically based on incorrect readings.

Kent Swafford