Dave Porritt wrote: Paul: I'd be interested in how you are evaluating these improvements. If you remove a noisy agraffe from a piano to polish and improve it, you are also putting on new strings. How do you separate the one improvement from the other? I did restring the agraffe sections of a piano earlier this year for just this purpose (i.e. there was nothing wrong with the strings, it was the agraffes that needed to be replaced). The improvement was very noticeable though I didn't do anything to the new agraffes. I don't know how I would evaluate the difference between a new agraffe and new-and-highly-refined agraffe. dave Unless you could hear the same unison, before and after, side by side, which is impossible, you couldn't. Even a digital recording wouldn't be an accurate representation because you've either got to replace also the string, or reuse it, in which case, the contact point couldn't possibly remain constant. I'm not concerned so much about whether or not we endorse the procedure itself as much as the perception getting blown out of proportion. Like the pianist who constantly breaks strings heard through the grapevine that someone somewhere made claims that the capo shape could contribute to string breakage, and therefore, it was a defective piano that was causing the broken strings (new replacements of some of which broke as many as 3 times within 5 years). The piano was switched, and apparently, it too had a defectively shaped capo bar. I'm more concerned about the pandemic of unpolished agraffes that are already out there. Jeff -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20091001/6aea1b64/attachment.htm>
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