[CAUT] Steinway sound

[David Love]

That's assuming that you agree that all the changes that happened were
actually deliberate "design changes".  I'm more cynical.  I think it's often
more the law of unintended consequences than a conscious decision to change
the design.  A change of hammer making protocols or suppliers of felt and
molding produces a hammer that weighs two or three grams more than the
original, with a 16 mm knuckle it results in 7 leads in the bass or,
combined with an inexact plate indexing procedure, sometimes 9 leads.
People complain, eventually they move to 17 mm knuckle, people still
complain, they start trimming the hammer, the 17 mm knuckle doesn't work
that well with the old wippen so they modify all the parts and voila! A new
design of new and improved parts.  Or, apropos to this discussion, some well
intentioned individual from the outside decides that the original +3 gram
hammer was a design intention and seeks to modify the action ratio to be
able to handle it, keep the original 3-2-1-0 leading pattern to control
inertia and ends up with 1/2 inch key dip--but damn that thing feels light.
All because the hammer unexpectedly got heavy due to a careless
manufacturing.  I'm not suggesting that represents any particular factual
sequence of events but it seems more likely than that each of those was a
conscious design change.  

Of course, since the action ratios do vary quite a bit and different
pianists of different eras got used to all kinds of things, you might have
to make a decision as to what to do and in the process one pianist somewhere
who grew up on 7.0 action ratios and 9 leads in the bass might be unhappy.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't take a chance and make an executive
decision to put things together in such a way that you think is likely to
please or at least be pleasantly accepted by the great majority.  We have to
do that all the time and most venues only have one piano.  

There comes a time in every similar endeavor when you have to close the
book, shoot the designer and build the damn thing (and take your chances).


David Love
www.davidlovepianos.com



This raises an interesting point:  Since (like all other 
manufacturers of all other products) S&S reserves to itself the right 
to change it's specifications in whatever way, and at whatever time 
they choose.  So...following the logic of that logic (if you will), 
it's pretty obvious that (keeping things to actions), the "touch" 
would have changed fairly dramatically over time; and, the more one 
works on instruments from various periods the more one might come to 
this conclusion.  And, it might, therefore, follow, that one could 
legitimately use whatever parts are contemporaneously available today 
in order to attempt to recreate whatever that original touch (and 
tone) might have been, and stay within the overall concept of 
retaining the "Steinway-ness" of the instrument.  That part is all 
well and good; and, I think, qualifies as A Very Good Thing.

On the other hand, when one chooses to follow that logic, one has to 
be aware that not every pianist is going to feel ecstatic about 
either the sound or the touch.  So, another choice one makes in 
following the above logic is the one that consciously accepts that 
one's final product may not be acceptable to one or more 
pianists.  If one has multiple performance instruments, that may be 
cool, because, presumably (since one might choose to leave at least 
one with a relatively current "stock" setup) there would be other 
instruments from which to choose, and it wouldn't matter so much if 
one were not deemed satisfactory.  However, if one has only one 
performance instrument available in a given space, one might wind up 
with a fairly serious problem.

FWIW, statements like the one Jennie relates can often be traced back 
to the sales pitches developed by the old Piano Travelers' 
Association.  While in the context Jennie relates, the brand name is 
Steinway, many of these statements/pitches were developed to be used 
by a Traveler in their day-to-day work, and modified as necessary to 
fit whatever brand happened to be on the truck.

Best.

Horace