Here is what I wrote to this list very soon after the Grand Rapids convention (bold added): But the Phoenix System bridge termination/coupling system was the real eye opener. They had four grand pianos set up. One was a 5'8" (or so) Steingraeber with carbon board and Phoenix bridge. Next to it an identical piano, but with spruce board, Next to it a Steingraber concert grand in traditional setup (standard pinned bridge). And finally a rebuilt Baldwin, with the terminators going up to near the top of octave 5, standard pinned bridge above. So you could tell what difference it made very obviously. My verdict? Wow! Wapin on steroids. Sustain and clarity. And lots of "side effects" that go along with losing those bridge pins (like all the complaints we constantly make about them, from noises to dirty termination to false beats to tuning issues). My memory hasn't changed from what I wrote then. Though I am not sure from what I wrote compared to what I remember exactly how much of the lower bridge (into the tenor) might have been retrofit. Maybe they did the whole tenor section. In any case, they did not do the top two octaves of the treble bridge. And that portion clearly had far less sustain than octave 5, that had been retrofit. Fred On Jan 18, 2011, at 9:29 PM, Fred Sturm wrote: > On Jan 18, 2011, at 9:20 PM, Ed Sutton wrote: > >> Nothing odd there. As I recall, the top several octaves were retro- >> fitted with phoenix agraffes. One would expect the mass of the >> agraffe to increase impedence on those notes. > > > My memory differs. It was a partial retrofit: went an octave to an > octave and a half and stopped cold, with the remainder left original > condition. The point was to make it easy to hear the difference. The > rest of the display kind of overwhelmed it, with the buzz being more > about the carbon board. > Regards, > Fred Sturm > fssturm at unm.edu > http://www.createculture.org/profile/FredSturm -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20110118/85de7ed1/attachment.htm>
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