Ron and Alan, I think the piano described by Alan is actually an A Steinway and not and O. The O has 26 notes in the bass and lacks a tenor bridge. What Alan describes below is an A; judging from the date, which if correct, indicates the piano is probably the third incarnation of the c. 6 foot one inch A. The first was an 85 note roundtail: then from 1893 to 1897, at least in the US, they made a second form which was the 88 note roundtail- in my opinion a tremendous piano much superior to the 85 note, then the roughly parabolic shape of the tail was changed and "modernized" to the half-round shape used in the concert grand; at the same time the tenor bridge was eliminated and the piano left with a 20 note bass. A few years later the A was dropped from production and brought back after an interval of a few years in the 6 foot four inch form which, factually at least, should be referred to as a different model. However, marketing considerations apparently dictated naming, what was, essentially, a new instrument with a letter which people, apparently, remembered, and would, presumably, buy more readily. Judging from the knock-offs available then, which are made even to look identical in the case to Steinway, the inference that a demand continued to exist for the A after it was discontinued seems justifiable. The re-introduction of an A, in the form of a new model, speciously labelled as an A, suggests, I think, that the company felt it was losing sales in this part of the market and was determined to recover them. Checking on the serial number Alan gives I believe the piano is about 1896 - 97 and, may, therefore be a round-tail. My browser did not contain an image if one was posted of this piano. Actually, after having written that above it occurs to me that it must be a round-tail as it has a tenor bridge. The round tail, 88 note actually had two bichords followed by seven trichords, all wrapped. The elaborate decal reciting various royal personages in Europe appears, in several forms, on the American piano also and so, does not necesarily indicate an instrument from Hamburg. This, however, is probably academic as it is possible, at this time, that the factory in Hamburg was still simply assembling the instruments shipped from New York. I believe the actual production of in-house built, instruments in Hamburg began slightly later than this time, or, if Hamburg was allowed the latitude of actual production, it had just begun. At its inception the "Pianoforte Fabrik Hamburg" was not actually owned by Steinway and Sons but was, in fact, a private, collaborative venture of William and Theodore to which the company sold parts under a complicated system of accounting and licensure. The assembly, not manufacture, of these parts in Hamburg and selling the completed pianos in Europe was the function of the plant there. This caused some friction with certain family stockholders. Subsequent to the death of Theodore this was resolved by having the company itself acquire the private venture which was the Hamburg operation. An interesting aside: The factory in Hamburg was seized in WWII as belonging to an enemy alien - the Americans. Later, during the war it was bombed by the very same enemy aliens, that is the Americans, along with the British. You can't win for losing. With regard to the bass/tenor break there are any number of older six-foot American pianos which include anywhere from 25 to 28 notes in the bass, although few indeed that go to d30 as you note. Chickering, for example, long used 25. I would argue that bridge placement is as critical to an effective transistion as is scaling, and, of course, they can be looked at as one and the same from one point of view, and that a blanket condemnation of a bass under 28 or 29 notes is not justified as it disregards the effect on the transition of the bridge placement and scaling of the tenor. Chickering had a superior system in this respect, breaking after the 25th note in the bass but using speaking lengths in the tenor that are much longer than the scales of most similarly sized Steinway style pianos. There is a marked difference between Steinway-style pianos, which seems to be the only class of design approaches with which a general familiarity is had by most commentators here and referred to generally here on the list with mostly negative commentary, and Chickering-style which address some of the issues frequently raised with reference to design, particularly the heavily criticized scaling of the 20 note bass. For example, the characteristic placement of the bass bridge substantially closer to the edge of the board results in Chickering pianos with a significantly longer scaling per unit of case in the upper bass while at the same time inducing and tolerating a shortened first three or four notes relative to those in similarly sized Steinway pianos. The result of this approach, along with an effort made to bring the front terminations closer to the stretcher, is that speaking lengths, for what is is worth, in a Chickering 121 (a five foot four piano) are longer through much of the tenor and at least half of the bass wire than on a Steinway O which is c. five foot ten. Similar contrast can be had with other Chickering models. There are variations on this approach also with other manufacturers. Many times some of what I read here which purposts to be "novel, new modern scaling" approaches, appear, with all due respect, to have been substantially anticipated by manufacturers such as Chickering or Mason & Hamlin and they appear to get little credit for such. Also there a several American knock-offs and semi-knock-offs of the piano you comment on including the Mason & Hamlin AA. I would suggest, as I have before, that the return of the round tail sound, in the form of the O, was an attempt to sell to the market accustomed to the sound of the A. The L is virtually the same as the O except for the shape of the tail which is not rounded but the "modernized" form I refer to. To my ear, listening to the differences between the sound of the round-tail A's and the subsequent half-round form, the half-round form has a rougher bass with, perhaps a little more ring-time in the treble. Taking this impression and comparing it with that formed with another pair of instruments similarly situated, the L and O, one half-round and the other a round tail, this seems, to me at least, to hold true, although I still prefer, in both cases, the round-tail sound. . Regards, Robin Hufford Overs Pianos wrote: > Part 1.1Type: Plain Text (text/plain)
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