<html> <body> Terry, - The laminated panels used in most pianos that have them are cheaper to make because of the low price of the wood used.  Very low grade core wood has usually be covered with slightly nicer looking veneer.  Making up a soundboard of spruce, even low grade spruce, is more work and wastes much more of the raw wood. - I agree with you that there is no reason that laminated panels can't produce sound as well as traditional panels.  The few efforts at making high quality laminated soundboards have shown this, but they have always been a marketing flop.  The piano market is awfully conservative about changing materials. - These things boil down to the manufacturer's original reason for using a laminated panel.  If the original goal was to make a soundboard that was cheaper and "wouldn't crack," then the results will generally be a poor sound.  Especially so since the so called 'designers' at these companies often made no change at all to the rib scale to match the stiffer board.  Those companies which made the effort to make a quality piano with laminated soundboards succeeded to some degree (at least tonally), but then the cost was not that much lower than solid spruce and the marketing stigma prevented the pianos from doing well. Don Mannino At 04:07 PM 2/3/2004, you wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>Laminated soundboard panels got a bad reputation from cheap, poorly designed and manufactured spinets, et. al. of the 1950s, 1960s, etc. I've got a couple questions about these.   Was there anything wrong with the panels in these pianos, or was is only that the rest of the piano was terrible, so the panel earned the same reputation as the rest of the piano, or was the panel itself poorly designed and/or made. I know some of them had mahogany as the outer laminate - I don't know how thick that laminate was - perhaps there were panel density problems. Was the rest of the panel made out of Sitka or similar spruce?   I'm just trying to understand if a quarter-sawn laminated Sitka Spruce panel made today is incorporated into a well-designed and built piano, I presume it will perform as well as a solid spruce panel (maybe better when you consider tuning stability and longevity).   Also, why, in those cheap little spinets of yesteryear, did they use laminated panels on the soundboard? Isn't it more expensive to go through all the work of laminating up a panel compared to a solid panel? Maybe it is because they used old wood from industrial warehouse pallets in the panels?   Terry Farrell</blockquote></body> </html>