Ric, Why is Steinway "forced" to rely on dealerships to perform adequate prep work? There are many pianos that are in a far better state of preparation coming from their respective factories. I'd name a few, but it's a pretty long list. Steinway isn't forced to do anything. Like other businesses--and individuals, of course--they make their choices. They choose to send unfinished products to the dealers, and many of them escape into the field as such for many reasons. If the dealers aren't living up to their end of whatever bargain they have, other arrangements with independent techs should be worked out, as you've suggested. It would seem to me that S and S would be playing it safer if the standards of what is coming out of the facotry was raised. Regards, Dave Stahl -----Original Message----- From: ricb at pianostemmer.no To: pianotech at ptg.org Sent: Fri, 8 Dec 2006 2:48 AM Subject: Steinways / David Andersen Since Steinway actually is in a situation where they (at least for the present) are forced to rely on dealerships to perform adequate prep work... it may very well be in their interests to establish contact with a pool of non-aligned (and non-hostile) techs to work as a kind of control mechanism. Both to improve the general quality of finished instruments, improve what apparently is vulnerability in customer relations, and to identify dealerships that do not live up to their part of the <<bargain>> implied in the present manufacturer / dealer relationship. Cheers RicB On Dec 7, 2006, at 7:13 PM, Kent Swafford wrote: > What of the soundboards that have forced the term "killer octave" > into our vocabulary? > How does one polish the "diamond in the rough" that looks more like > a simple lump of coal? > Kent Obviously, board and any structure issues are a different story; much rarer, in my experience, than action issues. A lot of tonal issues that people might think are board-related are actually mechanics and tone regulation-related. If plucking strings in various sections of the piano produces the sound and resonance curve we desire, it's easy to tweak. Relatively. If the pluck test is bad, and the termination points are good, you've got a big problem. I haven't seen a New York Steinway since the early '80's that was terrible all around---condemnable. The vast majority of the Steinway problems I've seen in my practice for the last 20 or so years have been front-end problems---action and damper. When the action is balanced, regulated and the piano is tuned and voiced properly, a magical transformation takes takes---the piano starts to sing. The client is blown away. We've done this dozens of times on modern Steinway grands. I'd say the ratio of egregious problems in modern Steinways is around 20:1, front end to back end. YMMV. David Andersen ________________________________________________________________________ Check out the new AOL. Most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/pianotech.php/attachments/20061208/90264a38/attachment.html
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