Hello! While looking at some pretty big old pianos (parallel strung) which had cantilever bass bridges, although they had quite long speaking lengths, I was wondering how do these features influence the piano's sound? Now I did read the messages here lately, saying that many of you choose to remove cantilevers and shorten the speaking lengths. But provided that: 1. The cantilever isn't excessively long (let's say no more than 10 cm) so it's stiff enough and doesn't flex; 2. The backscale is sufficient (what is the smallest length recommendable for the backscale of A0?); Then, why wouldn't the cantilever make sense for moving the bridge footprint to a more flexible area of the board and thereby have longer speaking lengths? In other words, is the gain in speaking length worth loosing [whatever you loose through a cantilever bridge]? Up to what size, if any, is this a good trade-off? Now, I know that a floating board could solve this problem, but still, it's interesting to know if there are any other inherent flaws of cantilever bridges which I can't see so far. I have a Steinway O, under repairs right now, which has a cantilever bass bridge and a pretty short backscale on A0, yet it has a very deep tone in the bass. The board also seems to be quite flexible down there, if you knock on the bass bridge (strings are currently off) it produces a low frequency. So, what factors do influence the tone of the low bass and how? Regards, Calin Tantareanu ---------------------------------------------------- e-mail: dnu@fx.ro http://calintantareanu.tripod.com ----------------------------------------------------
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