Jeannie Grassi wrote: > Which reminds me of a question I have been meaning to ask for a long > time. It seems that many more new pianos have nasty front duplex > problems, surprisingly a lot in brand new Steinways. And yet, older > pianos (30,40,50-100 years) still have eluded that irritating noise even > with old, misshapen, over-lacquered or badly voiced hammers. I realize > that there are different methods of casting plates, but this seems to be > an epidemic across the board. Are higher tension scales creating this > problem? Hi Jeannie, You don't seem to have gotten any bites, so I'll take a stab. Basically, I don't know, but I don't think it's the scales. I see almost every piano that makes any claim at all to "quality" now has tuned front duplexes. The noises found are in the longest segments, typically starting at the first note in the capo section, as was the case with the post that started all this. The short segments aren't noisy. At best, the long segments aren't far off from making noise, which is why small changes in fitting, capo shape, and voicing sometimes help - but sometimes don't. The pianos with the single counter bearing bar and short duplexes never do produce the whistles and wails, because they're well under the critical length. With more pianos being made with long tuned front duplexes, and with the long term trend toward harder hammers, we're bound to find more noisy duplexes. When something is on the ragged edge of function, there are any number of often contradictory indications of what does and doesn't fix it, and for how long. That alone ought to be a clue. Ron N
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