Aural?

[A440A@AOL.COM]

Gina asks, ( with imagined raised eyebrows!)
>How can anyone tune any way except aurally, no matter what tools one uses
>to assist oneself?

Greetings, 
    Well,-tuning can be done with solid earplugs in and the machine making 
all the decisions. I tried this at Vanderbilt with some of the brand new 
Yamaha C3 pianos.     They had been tuned by the dealer's tech last month, 
right after delivery.  
     The first one was 17 cents flat in the middle and 25 cents in the top 
end, with as much as 5 cents in some unisons. Was I going to craft a 
temperament here, with all the aural refinement, carefully spreading it out 
over the keyboard?  No way!   I set up the SAT, did a15 minute pitch raise, 
and then plugged my ears and mechanically put all 230 strings where the 
lights said to according to the FAC numbers.
      I unplugged my ears and listened. The result?  An extremely fine tuning 
as far as stretch and evenness of tempering, the double and triple octaves 
were right where I would have wanted them, the thirds and tenths progressing 
like the escalator at Sears and Roebuck.  There were some fifths that were 
not tempered exactly as their neighbors, but to make them so would have 
changed the thirds, so I let the fifths absorb the inconsistancy. In short, 
the machine plotted out the 1.059 quite nicely. 
    The unisons were an entirely different story! Some of them were 
transparent, some of them bloomed, and some of them sang a nasal twang.  Even 
though the machine told me that the three strings were "there", there were 
other partials and phase considerations that I aurally would have put 
differently.  (So I did).  
    The unison is the most important interval on the piano, all need to be 
the same(usually).  Aural judgement is the only way I have found to 
accomodate the coupled motion results and phasing differences that are 
inherent in most unisons.   This is why I think the pure machine tuner is 
going to be missing a large part of what it takes to make a tuning sound 
clean.  
    Tuning the unison also tunes the tuner.  
Regards, 
Ed Foote RPT