There has been discussion in the past on this list of the problem of damper return noise when playing with una corda. This problem has really been bugging me more and more. The issue is that the dampers work fine with next to no return noise except when the una corda pedal is used. But when the u c is used, there is considerable, often very audible return noise, and it happens when someone is trying to play very softly so is doubly annoying, essentially in areas where there are trichord damper felts. I have tried lots of things, the most promising of which is to tilt the dampers very subtly so that flats hit the strings slightly ahead of trichords, and this helps but doesn't eliminate the problem. Different damper felt doesn't seem to help, though I can't say I have tried everything (haven't tried Yamaha or Kawai, for instance). I am at a loss what to do to avoid this other than to change hammer alignment and shift parameters so that all strings are always struck by all hammers. I am beginning to suspect this may be a major reason why the Steinway basement guys decided to make that change to their standard procedure. While I like to have the two string tonal palette available, the tradeoff of that return noise seems to wipe out the advantage. Does anyone else have thoughts on how to resolve this issue? Regards, Fred Sturm fssturm at unm.edu http://www.createculture.org/profile/FredSturm
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