Hi folks I havnt had time to post anything about this years Nordic Pianotreff in Helsinki. There was actually (again) quite a lot of interesting things presented there this year. I like to think that we in Scandinavia have established the best of the European Piano meets. In particular this year was one Richard Dain of Hurstwood Farm Piano Studios, who has allied himself with Steingræber & Sohns (who'm was also there this year). Together they were showing the new Phoenix Grand... a 232 cm long affair using a new variant of the bridge agraffe. The special bit with these agraffes is that the string supports are free floating, which allows the string to force them downwards onto the bridge independent of the overall downwards pressure on the soundboard. Dain has figures to assert that the contact between strings and bridge is strengthened quite significantly. He also presented evidence that this agraffe solution increased the overall efficiency of the whole system to transfer string energy into soundboard output. He claimed in informal discussion as well that the sustain obtained by this system is superior to the Stuart and other solutions. And interestingly enough he had data which showed that the increase in sustain had nothing to do with the increase in mass. He had altered the amount of mass used in each agraffe by several grams using different types of seating screws and was not able to measure any change in performance related to the mass change. He also was firmly of the opinion that the reason for the increased sustain was this bit about the string vibrating in a vertical mode longer. I of course mentioned some of the stuff we've talked about through the years on these lists. His response was that the soundboards ability to vibrate in a vertical direction with great easy compared to sideways was not the issue here. We didnt get time to go further into it. The fellow is a retired engineer... quite successful one evidently as he was able to fully finance the design and building of the Phoenix as I understand it. The other bit he showed was a slice of a Carbon fiber soundboard material. It was actually a laminate construction with two outer layers of spruce and an inner layer of carbon fiber. Quite a bit thinner then a standard soundboard. I understand he is getting ready to produce instruments with this stuff soon. Interested can find him at http://www.hurstwoodfarmpianos.co.uk/index.php Cheers RicB
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