..stability issue..

[Delwin D Fandrich]

I've been following this thread with some interest.  Of course, the comments
about the piano needing tuning -- at least a unison touch-up -- every couple
of weeks instead of every couple of months are correct.  Considering the
humidity swings a bar/restaurant go through daily it is quite unrealistic to
expect a piano to stay in tune longer than that.

Or is it?

Humidity related tuning instability problems have been around since the
birth of the piano.  Since this problem has been around so long, we now have
a pretty good idea of what causes these swings.  And, at least one partial
solution, the Dampp-Chaser system.

There is, of course, one more solution that would be even more effective:
designing and installing laminated soundboards.

Now, don't throw up your hands in despair and tell me about how lousy they
sound -- I know better.  The traditional laminated soundboards sound lousy
because they were either designed to sound lousy or they were not designed
at all.  They were just kind of tossed at the piano with some vague hope
that somehow they wouldn't sound too bad.  Others were deliberately designed
to sound crappy so that it would be easier to upgrade the cheapskate
customer to a 'better' -- i.e., more expensive -- piano.  Yes, I have some
real horror stories....

There are really only two things keeping decent laminated soundboards out of
pianos today. One, of course, is a negative marketing history that would
(might) make them somewhat more difficult to sell.  The marketing and sales
people would have to eat some of the incorrect information they have fed the
market about laminated soundboards.  With some creative thinking -- and it
seams that nearly all of the creative thinking these days is going on in the
marketing departments -- this could be done.  The other is design lethargy.
Or, perhaps, the virtual absence of product design budgets in many of the
remaining piano manufacturers.  I remain unconvinced that it cannot be done.
I believe that if just one manufacturer brought out a line of
high-performance pianos using well designed laminated soundboards, it
wouldn't be long before others were forced to get in on the switchover.

The benefits are clear:
    -- Potentially better sound across the scale, especially through the
upper third of
       the scale.
    -- Better long-term tone stability.  I.e., crown stability is better --
tone would not
       deteriorate through the upper third of the scale as is common with
some
       soundboard designs.
    -- Potentially lower manufacturing costs.
    -- More consistent tone performance from one instrument to the next.
    -- Far better tuning stability through even wildly swinging humidity
variations.
And, perhaps most important:
    -- Much better utilization of a rapidly diminishing natural resource.

Obviously this is not going to happen until the customer starts to demand a
better product.  Actually, the customer is demanding something better --
they are buying electronic keyboards to 'replace' the piano.  And can we
blame them?  Drunk customers can't tell the difference in sound and they
don't need tuning.  I can think of no excuse -- well, ok, complacency and
fear -- for continuing to build pianos that have problems like this when we
can do so easily do so much better.

Regards

Del