Bridge caps

[Yardarm103669107@AOL.COM]

In a message dated 4/2/2001 7:14:17 PM Central Daylight Time, 
RNossaman@KSCABLE.com writes:

<< It may be counterintuitive to you, but it makes mechanical sense to me. >>

Ron:
What, then, is the mechanical "sense". Why, then, does a bridge pinned 
shallowly, or a bridge pinned into a cap that is too thick not reaching the 
bridge trunk, have entirely different tonal characteristics from a bridge 
pinned into the trunk deeply. This is audible and certainly measurable with 
the proper tools; its audibility is not intuition or invention on my part; 
what accounts for it then? Is bridge pinning just a traditional way of 
securing the string over the bridge harking back centuries and having no 
other physical purpose than you purport? You say that you can see no other 
reason; is argument by the claiming the absence of positive proof a positive 
argument? Is this just a bit too legalistic? If one can truly claim audible 
improvement in the tone character of a piano through manipulation of the 
bridge termination, are you truly so anal :) that you require some harder 
science in order to accept that there is something going on here, but we 
don't know what it is yet, Mr. Jones? Still :) We can know a lot of the 
science but not all of it and derive speculative conclusions about the nature 
of things which may or may not turn out to be true. Intuitive thinking is not 
simply wanting things to be a certain way, or creative imagining. How do you 
know, in the absence of other information, that there is NOT energy transfer 
through the pin? Since either speculation is devoid of hard proof, then 
either may be right. MY intuition is that vibrational energy is passing down 
the length of the pin to whatever depth it goes through whatever material it 
goes through at whatever grain orientation of that material with whatever 
efficiency and with whatever impedance effects. Miniscule defined or 
undefined; audible, uncontrovertible. Pull a pin (or better, drive a pin just 
to that point where it is doing its mechanical thing holding the string in 
place and listen to the tonal characteristics; drive it a bit deeper and 
listen again, etc. I hear a difference. Really I do; I'm not making it up. I 
hope that this isn't one of those things that'll appear in the Journal of 
Irreproducible Results. 

This is absolutely fascinating, Ron. I hope that you know that I have been 
grinning since the beginning of this thread.

Also, I can't seem to read my drawings but a large whoops is in order; of 
course the string contact moves down the pin as the pin goes to vertical; 
didn't I say that? Oh well. 

With respect,
Paul