Thanks both Fred and Jim for the exchange of thoughts. A couple comments to both you.. First Fred mentioned a bit about finding anomalies in plain wire strings as well as wound. I havent mentioned anything about this before, but using Tunelab like I do I've been noticing more and more that the entire unwound section is subject to para-inharmonicity problems to a much more significant degree then ETD authors let on. Not that the ETD doesnt do a good job mind you... totally different discussion... but there ARE unexpected divergences in the unwound string from expected partials frequencies given the inharmonicity of the instrument. And sometimes... just shy of often I'd say... they have to be taken into account if you want that <<perfect>> tuning. To both of you.. and anyone else out there. I remain miffed about this basic quandry of Youngs origional inharmonicity formula and its demand that the Youngs Modulus divided by String Density should equal 25.5*10^10 when virtually no give data set for these two parameters yields anything really close to that. Thomas Young demands that Q/p = 25.5*10^10 Look up various specs for steel wire around the net for Youngs modulus and density of piano wire... plug in the values and check it out. To begin with there is a large variation of specs for the Youngs Modulus... yet virtually everyone agrees that density is about 7.85 g/cm^3. By the book then... if density is indeed 7.85... then Youngs modulus should work out to close to 2.00175 * 10^12. I'd love to hear an explanation about why theory and <<measured>> specs seem soooo far off from each other, and what to do about it when thinking about designing scales. Cheers RicB
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