> >"Perfect piano?" Aint no such animal, never has been, never will be. > > Newton > nhunt@jagat.com > There comes a point in any successful R&D process when 'less bad' becomes 'better'. When 'better' becomes 'BETTER' and is generally perceived to be better than everyone else's 'best', then 'BETTER' becomes the new 'best'. If the new 'best' is dramatically better than the old 'best' then it may become entrenched as the new standard by which all new attempts are judged. There are going to be a bunch of hard-core disciples of the old 'best' who will refuse to consider that what they see and hear is reality because it negates a lifetime of narrow-minded snobbery accumulated around the old standard. We will try to ignore them and they will (hopefully) eventually form a Society for the Preservation Archaic Standards (SPAS) to maintain an evolutionary baseline for study by future scholars. This is good because it both preserves the knowledge of the past, and allows for advancement elsewhere. The public will be at least two generations behind the SPAS group in the appreciation of technological advancement in piano design, so the new 'best' will probably be judged against the previous 'best' on such time honored criteria as case finish, price, name recognition, and the square footage of the lid as it applies to the number of family photographs and flower vases it will accommodate. Most folks would reach right over a chunk of jade as big as a brick to pick up a pea sized chunk of pyrite. It's shiny, you see, and that's what counts unless they have been taught to recognize jade in the rough, and are aware of it's value. The old folks are long past the ability to learn because, they will explain to you, they have been out of school for a long time. Therefore, the new 'best' must last in the marketplace long enough to be discovered by the customer's children, during the period in which they are still able to learn, before it will gain any real following. Meanwhile, if 'best' has gone up three levels somewhere else, it will be relatively unappreciated as the entrenched prejudices of the public ooze at glacial speed to new levels of perception. The perfect piano may not be possible, because the standards are non-quantifiable, but pianos in general are a lot lousier than they have to be by any reasonable cost of production concern. It's like putting up with the old dog's noises, smells, and evil social habits because he has been around for a long time and you are used to him. You can't really fix the dog, but the piano is still greatly improvable. We can each pick out one or two outstanding characteristics from different brands of piano. Some have excellent dynamic range, some have unusual clarity, tunability, uniformity across the compass, action response, control, power, repetition. If all this scattered wonderfulness could be rolled together into one piano, you would have something extraordinary without any design magic other than what's already been out there for a hundred years. Throw in some recent advances in the understanding of action geometry and dynamics, and soundboard, bridge, and rib configuration, and the best piano ever made is setting right over there waiting for someone to care enough to make it. By the time it is whittled down to what the manufacturer thinks he knows (from experience) will sell, or what the staff engineers understand, it usually becomes what you see in the showrooms today. It's out there folks, if not for the oceans of ignorance and politics between conception and reality, we could all be more spoiled than we could have ever hoped. Newton's right. Sorry about the purge here, is it a full moon or something? EndRant, Ron
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