Susan Kline wrote: > It might have been better > to use the guitar as a model for a better acoustic system. Better yet, compare > where the violin and the guitar differ, and find out why the guitar has > better tone and sustain when plucked. The biggest difference is the post and most of the piano examples don't have them. But then the fairly enclosed volumes of air would make a lossy coupling and damp the boards' very large areas. Viols developed from guitars, and some have posts and others not; while a finger makes a fairly inefficient termination for the speaking length of a plucked string, my fretted viol (with a post) has the same type of short, loud pizzicato tone I described - I didn't mean that it was disappointing on these instruments, though! > I assume that Maccaferri's Selmer guitars with the double back have improved > tone because the second back prevents the first from being damped by contact > with the player? ... the same reason we hold tuning forks by the very end. It's more related to speaker design, where the cavity is sectioned (plywood body except the top; the internal 'back' extends from the end block to around the d shaped sound hole). I think that this line of thinking is more appropriate to pianos - is it Kawai that features a soundboard hole in one of their uprights? Mehlin grands similarly have cut-outs at the tail end of the board. _The Piano-Forte_ is indispensable, even while Harding covers only through 1851. Required reading. Clark
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