[CAUT] Steinway "sound"

[Horace Greeley]

At 09:52 PM 2/18/2011, you wrote:
>I'm not a wood technologist either and so I really don't know the 
>answer to the question about kiln drying versus air drying and have 
>to rely on those who know a lot more than I do.  So far I'm not 
>convinced about a big difference there.

I think something that gets overlooked in discussions of the merits 
of kiln or air drying has to do with the wood, itself.  Most spruce 
selected for use in soundboard making is between 100 and 150 years 
old, which means that it will have grown not only through a number of 
wet and dry seasons, but also through whole years/multiple-years in 
which the weather cycles are different (wet/dry, hot/cold).  As a 
result, once cut to boards, there will be ones of greater and ones of 
lesser strength.  That is, the modulus of elasticity (MOE) will be 
different not only between different boards, but also within 
individual boards.  OK...that's wood 101.

 From a manufacturing standpoint, the problem with kiln drying as 
opposed to air drying is that air drying takes too long and, 
therefore costs too much.  Kiln drying is, on the front end, more 
cost-effective.  The problem is that the two methods product very 
different results.  Basically, kiln drying only removes moisture 
content, leaving the acids and oils still in the wood in a nominally 
anhydrous form; but, the cellular structure (especially as to cell 
size) remains largely the same...so, more cuts are possible, which 
means more soundboard strips per tree.

Bruce Hoadley's book: Understanding Wood, has a fairly extensive (and 
significantly more authoritative) discussion of this.

>   One of my suspicions about how the newer bellies age (with 
> compression boards) verses the older ones doesn't lie in the area 
> of how the wood is seasoned but in the advent of full diphragmization.

I tend to agree; noting that there were other changes made during 
that overall period which also contributed, but were less obvious.

>  Speaking of redesign, some of it happened before all this recent 
> talk and apropos to the discussion generally, I'm not sure those 
> redesigns were a better thing (or that one anyway) and might even, 
> one could argue, have contributed to a new wave of redesigns to 
> handle the failures of the *original* redesigns.

Precisely so.

>Better quit now, starting to feel like Rumsfeld with the known unknowns.

Nah...it's just time for a good single malt.

Best.

Horace



>David Love
>www.davidlovepianos.com
>
>From: Brent Fischer
>Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 7:22 PM
>Subject: Re: [CAUT] Steinway "sound"
>
>    With the current state of available wood selection and kiln drying
>methods that have been accelerated over the decades I have to really
>wonder if that isn't one of the more important core issues that we
>overlook in these discussions. I think we have lost much of the spruce
>that had slightly wider early wood rings transitioning into latewood. Better
>growth seasoning if you will. I'm not a wood technologist but I firmly
>believe there is a correlation between slower seasoned spruce, that
>isn't rushed through the steam kiln to dry out the bound water, and
>how a belly ages into a performance sound. Don't you think that
>redesign starts there?
>
>Brent