On 1/25/2011 12:37 AM, Jon Page wrote: > OK, I mis-spoke. It was not the humidity that affected the tuning, > it was the temperature. > > > Please excuse my imprecision on vocabulary/concepts. Sorry Jon, but it is. That doesn't do us all that much good with tuning though, because the darned thing still moves as we tune. The frustrating thing is being unable to do anything about it. We open the DC equipped piano, and wait for it to go sharp as the strings cool. Then we try to tune it as the heat or A/C cycles. When we close it up after the tuning, it heats back up and goes a bit flat. It's just a limitation of the circumstance. A super climate controlled room would still go through those short term heat fluctuations as the system cycled. The alternative is finding the uncontrolled piano 30¢ off pitch in the tenor and low treble every single time we tune it, knowing that it's sounded pretty wretched for most of the time since the last tuning. We have these marvelous electronic devices available today, that can give us measurements of tuning effects with a precision far beyond our capabilities of controlling the atmospheric conditions that produced them. It's like a teacher that has made it known that no matter what is turned in, there will be no 100% scores graded. So we have to grade on the curve. Short term temperature variations are a fact of life whether a DC is present or not, and at whatever level of precision we may be able to reach, we still have to grade on the curve at some point. Ron N
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