<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> On 5/18/2012 8:19 AM, Ron Nossaman wrote: <blockquote cite="mid:4FB66893.40509@cox.net" type="cite">My thought was that the master tuning process would be as close as anyone would likely get to a repeatable aural tuning, that would be anything like acceptable to the armchair believers. </blockquote> This brings up an interesting point. Aural tuners probably come in several flavors as far as the uniformity of their work is concerned. They would have to be tested a number of times to find this out. Some might be extremely uniform in their results, while others might vary a lot yet still produce musically acceptable results. Obviously, having an aural tuner who has never been influenced by working with an ETD is not on your list of priorities. Oh, well, it would have been interesting to see what effect working with a machine has, and whether someone who has never worked with a machine produces a qualitatively different tuning. For instance, do they set octaves exactly on a coincident partial, or do they actually avoid them? Does the choice of partial vary with the part of the scale, and does it change over at roughly the points the machine chooses?  -- but I can see that it would take a large sample number to come up with anything convincing. The possible number of people who have never used a machine is shrinking by the day, as the gray heads thin out. I just received my third Social Security payment, for instance. Never mind ... if no one else is interested, that's pretty convincing that it's never going to happen. To extract this kind of information in the future from old recordings would be damned near impossible, IMO. Bowing out. Susan Kline </body> </html>