<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> Bill - While it is no doubt true that a motivated EDT user lacking aural skills can often do as well or better than a decent (let alone a careless and/or poorly trained aural tuner), I think that there's another good reason to continue to encourage aural tuning, which is that it teaches critical listening skills that are necessary for other work besides tuning. In the film Note by Note one of the Steinway factory workers talked about how only aural tuning was acceptable to bring out the musical qualities in a piano. Mind you, he was just chipping a freshly strung piano and I thought at first that this was ridiculous! He should definitely be using an EDT, at least at this stage for efficiency. But it later occurred to me that this chipper might well move up to become a tuner and eventually a voicer, and all that carefully listening along the way would really help to prepare him for that. When he finally gets to the selection room - that's when he should use an ETD! That being said, I think that aural-only tuners are missing out on a lot by eschewing EDT's. In my own case, moving to an ETD really helped me to improve my stability and also encouraged me to try different styles of octave tuning. In fact, it taught me a lot about aural tuning. It also removed some of the drudgery of aural-only tuning (allowing for extra time spent on other aspects of service). With an ETD, aural checks need only be performed once and then the display noted before and after stability tests (hard blows, pin-wiggling, or whatever). If further adjustment is needed one need only refer to the display instead of the time consuming checks. Pitch corrections are much faster, or at least less fatiguing, and when one can appreciates how easily pitch is affected with even modest changes in string tension elsewhere then one is more likely  to compensate somehow to produce better tunings. I routinely float pitch  up to at least 442 in non-critical situations. If most of the piano is there already I don't think it makes much sense to do otherwise except by request or necessity. Here again the ETD allows me to quickly evaluate the pitch across the entire keyboard to decide the quickest, most stable path to an in-tune piano. - Mark On 5/10/2012 8:15 AM, Bill Fritz wrote: With the advent of the ETD, many Piano Techs without the "RPT" title, with some experience & the ETD, can out tune the "Craftsman" of old.  And yet the PTG keeps pushing this old focus. Best Regards...   Bill Fritz, St Louis </body> </html>