Ron N: If you actually read my response you would have noted that I said there are times when trichords may sound better and should not be simply rejected out of hand. That was all. I'm not sure what factual manner you mean. Do you mean numbers? Numbers sometimes tell the story but sometimes they don't. I speak from my own listening experience and have not found reason to eliminate trichords from the arsenal completely. While manufacturing can be tricky (damper fitting is probably my biggest complaint about them really, the rest is of no consequence), it is by no means impossible or destined for poor matching. There may be a place for them on certain pianos. What's so hard to accept about that. Is that a threatening statement? I don't get it. My point for Jim was more an observation and I repeat, if the transition between wrapped and plain wire works then the scaling is correct because no amount of soundboard manipulation will correct poor scaling. If the transition between wrapped and plain wire doesn't work then it is not clear if it's a scaling problem of a soundboard impedance problem. You have to go further to make that determination. It may depend on the bridge configuration and other criteria. The conclusion I meant for him to draw from that was that the plain wire section exists and presumably is how you want it. Now you are going to add a wrapped transition section and he was discussion modifying the tension in order to address certain soundboard impedance issues existing in small pianos. I think that is a mistake because since it's the same soundboard that is reacting just fine to the plain wire section, why would you do other than produce a scale which blends with that. But I digress. You've preached plenty, let's be honest. Yes, wrong again. I'm not bashing every idea in the least. However, this list represents a marketplace of ideas and when I read something I disagree with or that has other ramifications then I will say something. I don't suppose you've ever done that. There are people who glean things from this list who take much of this talk at face value and don't question beyond the way many of these ideas are marketed--and I use that word deliberately. Re this discussion, I don't think Jim is doing that, he's asking a lot of questions and good ones too but I think the answers shouldn't just be run through the mill of personal design philosophy. I understand what you do, at least to the extent that you've shared it on every level and in every detail on this very list plus what we've talked about: large bass and treble cutoff, steeper grain angle, no panel thinning, tight rib radii, increased number of ribs, radial arrays, simple ends beam formulas to calculate loads. Not only have we talked about it but I have built some pianos over the years that pretty much conformed to those ideas. And I've built them in more conventional ways as well. When's the last time you built a board without or with a very modest cutoff, with modest (5.5% EMC) compression, more conventional and modest rib radii, with conventional grain angle, even modest panel thinning, with greater focus on optimizing the rib scale (large discussion here on what that means exactly) and listened to it side by side with one of your more recent pianos? What did you think? Well I've done that many times now. I've simply pointed out that there is a difference and that people should be aware of it. Not all the differences are bad and not all of them are good. There's a trade off. What you are doing is not simply optimizing the engineering and producing a better form of what was there--removing the warts as you are fond of saying. It's changing the character of piano that didn't previously have those features. I'm not convinced that many people getting their design chops by reading the list are aware of that. In fact, I'm fairly convinced that they are not getting that. Whether or not one is "better" than the other I'll leave to those who actually play them to decide. There will inevitably be disagreement there and I don't have a problem with that. What I react against is the implication both tacit and explicit that these changes simply remove warts. They don't, it goes deeper. Spring rate as such is something I look at but it's down in the list of several criteria that I use to determine if the rib scale is optimized. By itself spring rate (deflection per designated amount of load for the uninitiated, e.g., mm's per lb) doesn't tell you much. One fundamental difference in this realm is that you use simple ends formulas (unless you've changed) and I use fixed ends formulas for beam calculations. That tends to make my rib scales much lighter. A fixed end beam (as you are aware) supports a load about 4 times that of a simple ends beam. David Love www.davidlovepianos.com Nossaman wrote: No, just a sensible reply. Sure, you acknowledged it, followed by a general limitation of short pianos as a reason to use trichords, followed by the absence of permission to redesign used as a justification that there is a "place" for trichords under certain circumstances - like when you have no permission to redesign and have no choice, which you didn't acknowledge. That's OK with me too, if this can be done in a straightforward factual manner. Note, please, how I haven't preached on how every choice you have made in redesign is in dire danger of going too far, or not far enough, and screwing up some nebulous tonal criteria I currently think is desirable. Are you still using spring rate to dimension ribs with downbearing load analysis, or is that wrong now too? My mistake. I had this vague impression you were bashing everything I said I do pretty much point by point. Wrong again, I guess. Ron N
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