We were talking about the tuning contest, and David Love was pointing out that many aural tuners in daily work probably didn't reach nearly to Virgil's standards, as least, that's how I read it. He seemed to be saying that the real contest in ordinary daily work on low quality pianos with time limitations was between an AVERAGE RPT aural tuner and an unaltered out-of-the-box ETD tuning, and that's where the rubber met the road, for tunings as actually done in the field. Here is what he said: <<Something else to consider is that Virgil is a very highly skilled aural tuner, arguably more highly skilled than most. So with your average pass the exam at 85% RPT, how would they compare with an out of the box tuning from an etd--let's assume solid unisons on both. Then you should ask how many aural tuners actually apply the rigorous aural checks at each tuning (especially the fourth or fifth one of the day on the little upright that also needed a 50 cent pitch correction) to insure that they achieve a finely honed temperament octave and a uniform and balanced stretch. Then, I think, we have our real comparison where the rubber actually meets the road.>> And I was pointing out that the only truly valid criteria for evaluating actual tunings in the field were the musical results, as experienced by pianists and listeners. You could (and no doubt many will) argue that a tuning which tests better on an ETD will be more musical as well. I'm not so sure this is universally true in all conditions. It just seemed to me that we shouldn't lose sight of the real aim of our work, whatever the tools used. He does talk about the need for an exact temperament octave and a balanced stretch, which surely are desirable, and he suggests we consider solid unisons a given; so he has mentioned some musical qualities. Just how exact a temperament needs to be to give a musically excellent result seems a pretty shaky platform, to me. They can vary a great deal, and people often like them better than exactly equal. On consideration, I'd say that our #1 task is to get as musical a result as possible, but a close second is stability when the piano is subjected to its expected use. Susan On 1/31/2011 11:26 AM, Mr. Mac's wrote: > On Jan 31, 2011, at 1:03 PM, Susan Kline wrote: > >> If we're talking about the quality of the final product in practical terms, the rubber >> meets the road for a pianist playing and an audience listening to music. Nowhere else. > Susan, > > I certainly don't necessarily understand where you are headed in your response to David, > but in practical terms, the pianist and the audience live with what is, > otherwise, there is no performance. > > Pretty general comment, I agree, subject to open interpretation. > > Keith > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/pianotech.php/attachments/20110131/02daaf01/attachment.htm>
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