Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Q. for Del? "Grands suitable for small room"

In the recent thread about the Charles Walter 175 (http://www.pianoworld.com/ubb/ubb/ultimatebb.php?/topic/1/14894.html) Del wrote:
There are also differences in timbre, or voice. A smaller piano really should be designed with a voice more suitable to a smaller room. .

On this subject I would like to ask a few specific and a few general questions.

Specific :
Do you know of any grands indeed designed as to fit a smaller living room? In general one gets comments on this forum as "keep your hands off of grands with a size below 6' because they are below par in the bass section and/or they are very harsh in the upper section...
Now I could well imagine it should be possible to design a small grand according to the accoustic environment in which it is meant to be played and for the type of music that is supposed to be performed best on it, i.e. 23 X 23 ft * room (not a concert hall or big dealer showroom) and not for the thundering Lizst or Rachmaninov concerts. I would describe it as having an even equilibrated tonal character throughout the entire spectrum and indeed lacking the overall power in the bass section which a concert grand is supposed to have.
If any suggestions, then preferably brands that are also available in Europe (e.g. not like Charles Walter which is only sold in Northern America).

General:
About the difference in sound propagation between a grand and an upright an often heard comment is that because of the design nature of an upright (vertical soundboard placed against a wall) sound is reflected directly back into the face of the pianist (especially noticable with the larger 52" uprights with not too sensitive action mechanisms - something I experience myself), whereas with grands the sound is more evenly spread troughout the room, which makes it more pleasing for the performer.
Does this also mean that with a grand, irrespective of size, sound is also automatically propagated through walls into neigbour's houses ? I do not live in an appartment but in a house with a neighbour at one side of the house (the neighbour once said he could now "occasionally" hear my upright as a "faint background noise"). As to back-up my concern I quote from an e-mail of a forum member (wagscpa) who wrote me about his Kawai GM-10: "My little grand fills the room, house, and sometimes the neighbourhood with music. When I first had the piano one of my neighbours said she used to sit outside in her back yard (a couple of houses away from mine) and listens to the piano....None of the windows were open. My little piano could be heard a few houses away with our house completely closed up. That never happened with my little upright."
This is something that is hard to find out in a dealer showroom and which you merely realize when the piano has been delivered to your house!

* please read post # 11 for a better specification of the room dimension
Sorry for the long thread!

I doubt that even Del could come up with a grand to fit in a 23 sq ft room. That's less than 5 ft in each direction .

Best wishes,
Matthew

Sorry Matthew

I meant 23 x 23 ft (529 sq ft) and edited my post. (I am more used to the metric system)

I'm not Del, but try the Petrof V, or a smaller Bohemia. Basically what you need is just a smaller piano.

I was going to say, the piano that came to my mind has a wind-up key in the side!

But 23x23 is much more like it. Thanks, schwammerl for clarifying.

23' x 23' doesn't seem all that small to me.

As I am never one to pass up an opportunity to recommend my own piano, I'd nominate the M&H A as a good grand for a smaller area. It's only 5'8" but has impressive power, imo equal to if not superior to that of many 6' - 6'4" grands. It might not help out with your problem of trying not to bother the neighbors, though. It's still capable of being pretty darned loud.

p.s. The room my A is in is probably 14 x 12. The piano fits nicely in there, but I wouldn't want anything much bigger.

Steingraeber 168 is enchanting. Try it.

I agree with Monica about 23 square not being that small.

I disagree about size, however. Larger may mean potentially more volume but not necessarily. Granted that a larger piano generally produces better bass and that bass can really move through walls.

If occasional thunderous bass is ok, I would judge more based upon what size you have available and budget and then go from there.

Also, the recording posted here recently (in one of the "Identify" threads) made on that Fazioli 5'2" was spectacular. Beautiful tone, regardless of size, but absolutely amazing considering it.

The other thing to consider is the height of the ceilings. I have a small living room, and 7.5 ft ceilings. It doesn't take much sound to fill the room.

I played a Bluthner Model 10 (5'5") at Classical Grands in Seattle, and was very impressed by it. It had a big sound for its small size.

AdagioM

The height of the ceiling is quite standard: 8.5 ft and the real dimension of the living room where the piano would be in is only 396 sq ft (the remainder 133 sq ft - an office space - being completely separated from the living room by a folding door).

I guessed as much . That's hardly a 'smaller' room though: even a 7 ft piano would be just fine in it.

Best wishes,
Matthew

1) I think you’ve gotten a few good suggestions for smaller pianos for you to look at. I’m not intimately familiar with all of these so I can’t comment on how suitable some of them might be. I have looked at the Estonia 168 and am somewhat familiar with its scaling so I’ll say a bit about its design—at least as I see it. This is a well-built piano that is not designed for maximum power. It’s scale tensions are relatively low which means the soundboard can be somewhat on the thin side and it can be lightly ribbed. It will not have the potential for great volume but it does have a good dynamic range. That is, the timbre, or voice quality, has a nice change from ppp to fff. More than just a volume change from less loud to louder. On the samples I’ve seen the bass-to-tenor transition could have been a bit smoother. The lowest bass strings are a little longer than I would like to see on a piano of this size and it doesn’t have quite the clarity in the very low bass that I would like. But it is no worse than many other pianos in this size range and is better than many. The lower tension scale means that the hammers can be voiced down somewhat more than on the typical high-powered Asian pianos. Also on the down side, the piano is considerably wider than it needs to be. But this is not unique to the Estonia. All of the short grand pianos on the market today are wider than they need to be. Whether this is simply due to tradition or sloppy design is a question for others to answer.

2) Modern vertical pianos generally have tight-fitting casework and so, yes, they do produce most of their sound out the back. Which is why it is a good idea to place these pianos some distance away from the wall against which they are inevitably situated. It has been my observation that people generally do play vertical pianos harder and louder than they play similarly-sized grands. For the most part this is the only way they can really hear them. Amazing things happen when the piano is moved away from the wall a few centimeters (inches for the only industrial nation still using the antiquated Imperial system of measurements).

As to whether or not the sound of your piano will readily propagate through the walls of your home and annoy the neighbor—well, partly, I suppose it depends on how well you play. I’ve had neighbors who could play as loudly as they wanted and I’d enjoy it. And others who I wish wouldn’t play at all. Ever! Seriously, it also depends on how well insulated the walls of your house are. Do you have single- or double-pane windows? I would expect a piano like the Kawai to be heard through walls fairly readily, regardless of its size. These pianos tend to be fairly brightly voiced; just one more reason for choosing a warmer sounding, more dynamically voiced piano. I have had the experience of tuning and voicing pianos in apartments in which the neighbors have stopped complaining about the piano being to loud after the hammers have been voiced down to take that sharp edge off the sound.

Del

Thank you Del for taking te time to answer my questions.
May I elaboarte a bit on the points you mentioned...

1) You say: "All of the short grand pianos on the market today are wider than they need to be"
Do you mean at the front (keyboard) side? E.g. Boston claims it as a benefit to have a wider tail!? They also say so have a low tension scale design. Is this similar to what you wrote about the Estonia?

2) You recommend for an upright that "...the piano is moved away from the wall..".
I once found a link on the internet (# 5, cc88m of this thread) http://groups.google.be/group/rec.m...pright+grand&rnum=5#c4516658b760414c , where it is said the upright should be (for the important frequencies) 1/4 wavelength away from the wall. If one figures that out for f = 440 Hz (@ v = 340m/s; wavelength = 77 cm), it would be +/- 19 cm distance from soundboard to wall, or taking into account backposts of 8 to 10 cm, 11 to 9 cm distance from the back of the piano to the wall. Any comments on that?

You say "I would expect a piano like a Kawai to be heard through walls fairly readily, regardless of size".
If that is already true for Kawais that are considered to be mellower than e.g. Yamahas, I suppose this statement will the be true for many more Asian grands?

Hi Schwammerl, you may not want to hear this but I would recommend a Wendl & Lung PR 161. I have it in a room which is about 5m x 8m so a bit smaller than yours. But the ceiling is very high (just under 4m). However it is not overpowering at all and I was even accused of playing too quietly the other day when accompanying a singer!

Have I missed a post or are you still looking for your new piano?

Hello again JohnEB

Yes I am still looking for a new piano; no you have not missed anything.

You know I am also much in favour of a W&L grand; my wife is much less convinced (? a prejudice against buying "Chinese"?)- perhaps you will have to come over as to convince her!
But you already know the trade-in problem of my upright I would have when buying a W&L from the nearest (and competent) dealer (Ghent)!
For your information, I tried last week to sell my Boston UP-132 (9 months old; list price VAT incl. € 11.900,-) to an international piano trader in the Czech Republic: he offered me a "silly" € 2000,-.

At the same time I am looking at high quality smaller uprights like Grotrian-Steinweg Carat and Blüthner C.

By the way JohnEB, in your thread announcing your purchase of the W&L 161, you promised to post some pictures one day.
Have I missed anything?? I would be interested to see it installed in the room you describe.

If it were possible I could inform you by e-mail of any decision in the future. You can e-mail me through this forum if you click on "schammerl" to get my profile.

You might want to take a look at the Vogel 177T. I have this piano in a 10' x 14' room with ceilings of the same height or a little shorter than you have. It is plenty loud enough for me, and I am able to get the dynamic range out of it that I require in my playing. Recently I found out it does not bother the neighobrs at all. In fact one of them remarked that the piano isn't as loud to them as my old upright was.

John

1) Mostly I mean the measure across the outside of the front rim arms. That is, at the front of the piano.

I am aware of the claim (not just made by Boston) that the wider tail is supposed to be of some benefit. I wonder, then, why Steinway (NY) has recently dropped the Model L in favor of the old Model O. Or, when they brought back the Model A, it was the older A1 rather than the better-performing (in my opinion) newer Model A2.

The soundboard should be sized appropriately to the scale and the frequency range over which it is expected to function. To reproduce low-frequency sound at reasonable sound power levels the diaphragm moving the air must be either mobile enough to move through some distance adequate to move enough air to be heard or, if it cannot move very far, it must be larger. It is this latter approach that is claimed by marketing departments such as Boston’s. And it would be a valid concept if one could ignore minor problems such as the inherent flexibility of a vibrating panel such as that used in the piano. Physically large soundboards have a problem with built-in resonances. If the panel is made stiffer to resist breaking up, or segmenting, that stiffness works against it ability to respond to low-frequency vibrations. In the end, soundboard design is a trade-off of many disparate requirements—compromises must be made. Wide-tail pianos do not inherently produce better bass tones than pianos with narrower tails. It’s a question of design and balance through the whole system and soundboard size is rather far down the list of features critical to low bass performance.

I am not familiar enough with the Boston scales to make any kind of direct comparison between the Boston pianos and the Estonia pianos. Scale tension comparisons are always relative. Boston scales are lower-tensioned compared to what? Just from listening to the two pianos I suspect the Estonia scales are tensioned somewhat lower than Boston’s. I could be wrong, but I’d be really surprised if I am.

2) One-quarter wavelength of what? The piano is made up of more than one note. Which note do you choose? Or, having chosen a quarter wavelength of some given note what about all of its harmonics? Yes. I’ve heard and read these claims and none of them make any real-world sense. If you have an upright piano, and it’s up against the wall, move it out a bit. Say, 10 cm, or so, and see what it sounds like. Better? Try another 10 cm. It probably won’t sound much different. Try some different distance. Real soon you will find a point of diminishing returns. Then leave it there. That’s a good spot for it. Even better, open the piano up some. It puzzles me no end that the makers of vertical pianos insist on closing them up tighter than a coffin.

3) I don’t mean to pick on Kawai since, as you point out, it is generally some toned down compared to Yamaha. But, in my opinion, it is still rather brightly voiced. Both as it comes from the factory and as it ages or is played-in. Most Asian pianos are, again, in my opinion, overly hard and bright. Some can be voiced down, others don’t respond at all to conventional voicing techniques. I have made the comment (in the past, of course, when I was younger and more outspoken) that hammers requiring draconian voicing techniques to make them sound decent aren’t really piano hammers and they should be sent back to their maker. If they happen to come already installed in a piano—well, you may need a bigger box. . . .

Del

Del,

Thank you very much for your invaluable comments.

I will certainly play around a bit with different wall distances with my upright.
You are right about the tight-fitted upright cabinets. I noticed myself that by opening up the top lid and even the top front board, one automatically hears harmonics better and almost intuitively starts getting more controll over the instrument.

Schwammerl

Posted by Del:

hammers requiring draconian voicing techniques to make them sound decent aren’t really piano hammers and they should be sent back to their maker. If they happen to come already installed in a piano—well, you may need a bigger box. . . .

Or a big pair of vice grips to squeeze them with....