Gregory Torres wrote: > I find personally that when comparing a machine tuning with an aural one I > found the aural more "sweet". Maybe the ETD tunings are "technically" more > accurate but I personally will tune aurally when faced with a nice > instrument and am not pressed for time. JMHO In medicine there is the well-known phenomenon of the "placebo effect". Patients report feeling better just because they think they are taking medication. The same thing can happen when we casually evaluate aural vs. electronic tunings. Knowing that a piano has been tuned by one means vs another means ought to disqualify a person from subjectively evaluating the tuning - especially if that evaluation is to be used to draw conclusions about the means used to achieve the tuning. I'm going to disagree with Obiwan. "Don't trust your feelings, Luke." I'm not saying that aural tunings don't sound more "sweet". But such claims ought to be explored through a tune-off test, like the ones with Jim and Virgil, where the listener doesn't know the means used to tune each piano. Here's a more basic question: Can a highly skilled listener even _identify_ an electronic vs an aural tuning correctly more than 80% of the time? (I am assuming that in both cases, the best possible tuner is employed.) Robert Scott Detroit-Windsor Chapter, PTG
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