[CAUT] nasty overtone?

[Jeannie Grassi]

Thanks for taking the time to answer, Ron. 
jeannie

-----Original Message-----
From: caut-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:caut-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Ron
Nossaman
Sent: Sunday, May 30, 2010 8:29 PM
To: caut at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [CAUT] nasty overtone?

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