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Hi All,
I am looking to buy a Grand.
I do have Mr and Mrs Flinn's Buying guide.

I have seen specs with this:
"Soundboard: Solid Spruce core with Spruce veneer surfaces 10/12 spruce ribs"

This to me sounds like plywood..
I know how important the soundboard, Old guitar player.

My little voice tells me this is not a good idea. Am I correct?

Thanks for your input.

Views diverge on this, Nailgun. You may take advantage of looking up Del's posts on the subject; he is better-informed than some. My impression is that that alone is not the whole story of what makes a grand well- or poorly-designed and constructed.

And PS--- I'm glad you found Marty's book, which has a lot of essential information for shoppers. I still miss his voice here on the forum. Fine's The Piano Book, 4th ed. (the hardcopy) is informative also. Both taken together give a buyer a pretty good foundation, if it includes good lcoal shopping research and lots of in-person, hands-on try-outs.

Thanks, I will look up his post.

Laminated soundboards in pianos have been around for decades. Some pianos I have seen came with a lifetime guarantee that the soundboard would not crack. In these pianos, this was unfortunately coupled with a lifetime guarantee of poor tone.

Similar to guitars, it IS possible to build a good sounding piano with a plywood/laminate soundboard, but most decent sounding instruments have solid soundboards. Veneering a panel a very easy way to hide substandard wood used for its structure. Generally, it is a way a manufacturer can cut corners and pinch pennies, reduce cost and be competitive in the low end of the market.

I have seen some pianos with this kind of soundboard and as stated before here, they had a poor tone quality. To me it is a sign of when enginiering and business thinking is taking over from music instrument thinking.

What kind of piano is it? Where does Fine have it rated? Are you concerned about humidity where the piano will be located? What will the piano be used for?

All questions you might want to think about when making a decision.

Jonathan

Listen to the piano, if it sounds good, that is what counts. Wether the soundboard is laminated or not is not much relevant.

Look up Del Fandrich's posts.

I recently played NEW pianos with laminated boards, and they sounded great.

If you have heard pianos with laminated soundboards that “had a poor tone quality” then you have been looking at pianos with very poor design and engineering. The fact that they happened to have laminated soundboard panel is incidental; coming from the same manufacturer they would probably have sounded bad even with solid spruce soundboards.

Personally I fail to see the logic here. I also have heard poor sounding pianos that used laminated soundboards. But I have also heard poor sounding pianos that used solid spruce soundboards. If we’re going to condemn the one class—those with laminated soundboards—because of a few badly designed examples then, by all logic, we should also be condemning the other class—those with solid spruce soundboards—because there are even more badly designed examples of these.

Sometime back I wrote the following in response to another similar comment:



ddf

Thanks Del and all.
I am new to the Piano and my schooling has been fast. I have found soundboards with massive amounts of glue along the Ribs, My thought was it had been shimmed and not very well. We want a 6" grand, used, with many good years left. Found many pianos from China with laminated boards, just not to sure about them.
Del I know you are right about the strength of them. Tone is up to each person.

That is true, “Tone is up to each person.” It is true of all pianos no matter what kind of soundboard is used.

If a piano with either type of soundboard sounds “bad” it is an indication of poor design or poor manufacturing. We now know enough about how laminated soundboards work so that we can build pianos of either type with performance characteristics that are similar enough that most listeners should not be able to tell the difference.

ddf

Plywood is just not suitable as soundboards in pianos or as resonance wood in any instrument.
If you presume that a poor sounding piano with plywood would also have a poor sound with spruce, it is just speculation.
I am quite sure though that if you build in a plywood soundboard into a Steinway, Yamaha or any other well designed piano, you will hear how bad it actually is.
Spruce was chosen not by egineers or business people, but by instrument makers who used their ears and their experience.

Pianolive- Perhaps you don't know Del.
Not that I know him personally, but his reputation precedes him. I am quite sure he uses his ears and his experience. As he said, he has made piano with plywood soundboards and with solid soundboards. I think that is more than most of us can say? (Forgive me if you have done so and I don't know about your experiences as such).

Potter states that "According to Willard Sims, then Piano Service manager (at Baldwin in 1979) when they prepared identical grand pianos, except that some had solid and some laminated soundboards, they reported that neither the piano technicians nor artist pianists could tell the difference between the two, based on tuning performance, and stability, tone, or volume."

I agree.

No, what I wrote was not speculation; it based on my knowledge of how piano soundboards, including laminated soundboards, work and my experience with actually designing and building pianos with both types of soundboards. I have been designing high-performance laminated soundboards for pianos since the 1980s and have a pretty good idea of how they perform when they are well designed.

Rather than repeat myself here—if you are actually interested—I suggest you look through the thread labeled, “Piano Buyer Explanation for W Hoffmann Series,” which can be found at: http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1719289/1.html
It is a fairly lengthy thread but starting on the second or third page I and others had quite a lot to say about pianos using modern laminated soundboards.

ddf

Well, "choice" is not really a fair term when there was only one option. 200 years ago an more what else could have been used -- not leather, not stone, and nobody was making anything laminated with fine layers the size of a soundboard.

What we have here is perpetuation of a myth about some mystical quality of solid wood that makes it better than any other conceivable material. It's standard "post hoc" reasoning: assuming that "tried and true" implies some kind of rigorous selection process among various approaches when there was none.

As it is, solid spruce is a finite resource that will be used up at some point within a lifetime or two, so we'd better start getting used to the idea that we'll be seeing more laminated and completely non-wood soundboard solutions in our future. I expect some of them will be quite good.

All that said, most pianos (in terms of production numbers) with plywood boards have been in cheaper, poorly designed pianos to take advantage of the fact that some laminated panels are significantly lower priced than solid spruce. So, the general reputation of laminated meaning junk piano is understandable although not logical.

Kemp,
You are incorrect, spruce trees are a plant i.e. a crop, not a finite resource. If we need more of them we plant them.
So we won't use them in our life time but the next generation or two will. All forests have had fires that killed the trees, but we still have them.


Kemp wrote:
"As it is, solid spruce is a finite resource that will be used up at some point within a lifetime or two"

That depends on how fast they are used, and now they are being used faster than they are regenerating.

I hear this kind of comment fairly regularly; often in factories that are either making or using spruce to make soundboard panels where people really should know better. But ignorance is bliss and we are blissfully slashing and cutting and burning our way through the what were once the world’s largest and best forests. And, while it is true that “spruce trees are a plant, i.e., a crop” it is also true that the world’s spruce trees have some severe problems. Along with climate change has come new and more aggressive waves of spruce beetles which are taking out huge stands of spruce in Alaska and elsewhere. Unfortunately the spruce beetle seems to best like the older, more mature trees; you know, the types of trees that are suitable for piano soundboard production. The old-growth forests of the Pacific NW are largely gone and with them the large, clear spruce trees that were so well suited for soundboard production. The old spruce forests that once grew in China are largely gone and those few that remain are somewhat belatedly protected. More or less since illegal logging is still common in Chinese forests. The vast stands of spruce we thought were blanketing Russia have—and still are being—devastated by fires, spruce beetles and other pests such as the illegal loggers that are endemic to the society and the region.

The world will regrow spruce trees but it is unlikely we will ever see the kinds of spruce trees that our industry has counted on of its supply of soundboard stock again anytime soon. At least not in the quantities we have become accustomed to. Spruce is a hardy, fast-growing species that lends itself well to plantation farming and intensely managed forestry but these trees are used primarily for fiber, pallet stock and other such low-grade products. The nice straight tight-grain wood that we have traditionally sought for soundboard production comes from old, slow-growth trees that have had to struggle a bit for sunlight and survival. There are a few relatively small carefully tended forests where spruce is allowed to grow slowly and long but there are not enough of them to supply soundboard spruce in the quantities we have been long accustomed to finding. Sadly the picture is not quite the rosy scene you and others so often paint.

ddf

To make a table..any wood will do,.. to make a soundboard..that's another matter! and one that will stand the test of "time/years" to boot..

. . . no one calls a piece of furniture 'plywood' if it is made of a solid piece of wood with veneer.

You’re right, of course. At least in terms of today’s high-performance laminated soundboards. We all spoke derisively of the early panels that really were made using standard plywood construction and performed about as well as you would expect an off-the-shelf plywood panel to work. The industry has come a long way since those bad old days and today’s laminated soundboards bear little resemblance to their early predecessors. But traditions—both good and bad—last long in this business. There are still those who equate anything other than what they are used to and familiar with as bad. We can improve technology a lot easier than we can educate and change obsolete attitudes based on ignorance.

ddf

"There are still those who equate anything other than what they are used to and familiar with as bad. We can improve technology a lot easier than we can educate and change obsolete attitudes based on ignorance."

I am quite sure that I will be using this Del quote in subsequent posts (with proper attribution). Well said.

It follows from your first statement that many attitudes are based to a large degree on experience with the early panels.

I think it is safe to say that in the past many introductions of "new" materials into piano manufacturing such as plywood and plastics were not implemented to improve the instruments, they were done to cut costs in production. Usually, this came hand in hand with a reduction of instrument quality and was of little value to the people who wanted to make music.

Is it any wonder people are skeptical of new materials in pianos?

By this standard, then, we should still be skeptical of the use of plastics in automobiles, structural adhesives in aircraft, OSB in house construction, just about any computer software program, etc.; the list is nearly endless. Materials and technologies are introduced—sometimes for strictly cost-cutting reasons—they fail, they get improved and the product marches on often, over time, bringing lower cost products offering improved performance to market.

What is it about the piano industry that causes us to continue condemning whole classes of materials—even though the modern iteration of those materials is so advanced it bears little or no resemblance to the original—decades after their predecessors were initially introduced? Or whole classes of technologies because early iterations of them were flawed by ill-advised attempts to cheap one’s company to death?

If people applied the same logic—or lack thereof—to their automobiles and computers that they apply to the piano we wouldn’t be driving or communicating via the Internet.

ddf

So if this plywood is so good, where are the great pianos with plywood soundboards?
Piano manufacturers are not at all afraid of implementing new materials in their pianos as long as these materials improve the instruments or at least do not lower the quality.
Plywood does not have the qualities as resonance wood, but manufacturers can use the plywood in their low budget lines, like Yamaha or the Bechstein group do. It is simply a way to get new customers or beginners into the "family" hoping they will buy the real thing next time.

Did you actually read any of the thread I referenced above? http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1719289/1.html
If you haven’t I suggest you do so. In it several reasons are given as to why pianos of this type are not more readily available.

Don’t tell me piano makers are not afraid of new technologies, I know better. And the laminated soundboard panel is just one example. How long has it been since Kawai introduced their plastic actions? How many have had the courage and good judgment to follow? I have worked with too many piano manufacturers and have had too many conversations with marketing executives to accept your statement that piano manufacturers are not afraid to implement new materials and non-traditional technologies in their pianos. They are. There is deep-seated fear of going against tradition regardless of how it might improve performance.



I don’t understand what you mean by “resonance wood.” If you’re referring to the fact that, when struck, wood exhibits certain resonant qualities, yes it does. There is nothing magic about this, however; the resonance qualities of any wood—regardless of species—is simply an indication of that particular piece of wood’s stiffness to weight ratio along with some indication of its internal resistance. It tells us little, if anything, about how a soundboard panel made of this wood will function. And the romantic picture of the workman carefully tapping some piece of wood to determine its resonance is just that: a romantic picture. It does little to predict the performance of any soundboard made from that wood. Soundboard panels are diaphragms intended to be driven by energy from vibrating strings; they are not supposed to be resonant bodies. Resonances in soundboards, if they are strong enough, are voicing problems and are not generally considered advantageous.

If you have not studied the acoustical characteristics and performance of modern laminated soundboard assemblies then you don’t really know what you are talking about when you criticize them. If had you would know how good their performance can be and you wouldn’t be using the word “plywood” so contemptuously.

ddf

[quote]If had you would know how good their performance can be and you wouldn’t be using the word “plywood” so contemptuously.
[quote]

I'm not sure it's meant to contemptuous. Laminated wood is, after all, multiple plies of wood pressed together by definition.

Perhaps not. But usually—in my experience, at least—when the piano traditionalist uses the word “plywood” it is being used derisively.

In modern usage the word “plywood” almost always refers to a wood panel made up of an unequal number of wood laminae of more-or-less equal thickness that are alternately aligned at 90° angles. These panels are quite stiff in both directions. Panels of this construction do not work well as piano soundboards for a number of reasons.

The modern laminated soundboard panel is nothing like this at all. The core is typically quite thick and the two outer laminae are relatively thin. The outer laminae are typically aligned at a30° to 15° angle to the core. The stiffness characteristic of the completed laminated panel is not that much different than a solid panel of equal grain density and thickness. As a soundboard diaphragm the two—standard plywood construction and the modern laminated soundboard panel—could not be much more different.

ddf

I am not being contemptuous!
English is not my native language and resonance wood is our term for spruce used in pianos and tops on violins and so on. We also call the soundboard "resonance board".
A wooden plate glued together with other wooden plates is plywood.
If you look at violin makers they do not know why they use spruce, but they do know that it is the only wood to use to get a fine tone for music and not just a sound.
As I understand spruce reacts similar to all frequences humans can hear without taking away some of them. Sound does also travel rapidly through spruce. It is common knowledge that a new well constructed piano can improve in tone quality over years depending on how it is played. I simply doubt that plywood has got the specifics like spruce and that plywood age in the same way.
I do not understand why you, Del, gets so upset when some people here and piano makers dont want your plywood boards. It is not because the piano industry is conservative. I know some of them very well and they are indeed interested in developement.
What you should have in mind is that the modern piano has got a history and was actually improved in a kind of cooperation of pianomakers, musicians and composers. As I see it nothing essential has changed in the piano design the last 80 years.
So here you come and want to change the heart of the piano with plywood! What do expect? You can show all the calculations and computer models and I am sure you have a lot of knowledge about it, but you are up against 300 years of experience and evolution of how to make instruments.
I think your plywood boards must prove themselves in instruments for some decades.

Tell you what though, seriously.

I bet that if any of us were blindfolded and made to listen to two identical grand pianos, the only difference being one with a solid board and one with a laminated one, there isn't a one of us that would be able to tell the difference.

That might be so and something like that did happen when the iron soundboard in pianos were introduced, but so what? What I mean is that it will take maybe decades of real playing to see if plywood boards will be an option not only in budget pianos.
There are also experiments being made with thin spruce laminated with carbon fiber plates.

It doesn't matter how many times your throw in the word "plywood", it doesn't magically make a veneered or laminated piece of wood become plywood.
Ask any fine furniture maker that uses a thin sheet of one type of wood to cover a solid core of another type of wood. That is a laminate or a veneer but NONE of them ever refer to it as "plywood" yet you seem to throw that term around like you know what you are talking about.
I've done a fair amount of woodwork over the years and I've worked with veneers but no one except for a few stubborn axe-grinders on pianoworld refer to it derisively as "plywood".
You state that English is not your native language, well then why don't you learn to correct yourself when you are told by several people that you are using a word incorrectly rather than continue to use it incorrectly?
A solid piece of wood covered with a thin sheet of another type of wood is NOT plywood, no matter how many times you repeat the word it doesn't change that fact.

Source?

I am not going to play that game, particularly since you have the source already.

Thought so.

Then I apologize for assuming that was how you were using the words.

And, while I accept that you may call soundboards “resonance boards” I see that as a very misleading term. To me, at least, it implies that we want soundboards to be resonant when, in fact, we want to diminish, or reduce resonances as much as possible.



There is more confusion and misunderstanding about the piano soundboard and how it works than any other single part of the piano.

It is not true that spruce reacts similarly to all frequencies. Nor do soundboards made of spruce. Even if there was something magical about spruce a soundboard is not just a spruce panel; it is made up of a panel, a full set of (usually) cross-grain ribs of various sizes and shapes and a bridge. It is also usually crowned in some way and it is loaded with some amount of string downbearing. All of these things affect how the soundboard assembly is going to react to the vibrating energy in the strings.

It is true that some soundboard assemblies using what we call a “solid-spruce,” or “solid-wood” panel can change their acoustical performance over time. It is not true that this change is always for the better—often it is not. Usually this change occurs because the soundboard panel was built with some amount of internal compression and over the first months, or years, of its life this compression diminishes because of a natural process called [i]time-dependent stress relaxation.” I have written about this several times on this forum and on Piano Forum and I don’t really care to repeat myself over and over so I’ll just say that over time these soundboards lose some of their initial stiffness and that changes how the soundboard assembly responds to the vibrating energy in the strings. Sometimes we might find that the piano sounds better over time, other times we find it doesn’t sound as good.

One of the benefits of laminated soundboards is the fact that they do not “age.” That is, the soundboard is designed and constructed to function and sound a certain way and that does not deteriorate over time.



First, they are not just “my” laminated soundboards; I am not the only one designing them or promoting them. Several manufacturers are now producing pianos with excellent laminated soundboards. I don’t really care what kind of soundboard panels any manufacturer wants to use; I do get upset when people make inaccurate and misleading statements about them as you have done.

I am well aware of the piano’s history. I am also aware that little has changed in the last 80 years. I’ve been working in it for 50 of those years. I also know that we cannot continue to use high grade spruce to make soundboard panels for entry-level pianos. The kinds of trees needed for wood boards of this quality are being used—or are dying out—at a rate far faster than they can be replaced. If, indeed, we can replace them at all. I believe that high-end, limited-production pianos will be able to find and purchase this kind of spruce for some time but it is already difficult for the high-volume manufacturer to obtain sufficient quantities of adequate wood stocks.

We can explore many different types of soundboard materials for the future but most of them are going to be expensive—they are all tied to oil in some way—and there is also going to be market resistance to these materials. The only logical next step is to introduce more high-performance laminated soundboards to the entry- and mid-level pianos. Their performance and longevity have already proven themselves; the only thing standing in the way of their general acceptance now is the ill-informed criticism from people who simply don’t understand how the piano soundboard works and from marketing executives and dealers who are afraid of how consumers might react to them.

Again, I would suggest that you read some of my posts in the topic link I have provided. Those posts explain my position fairly well.

There are many sources and they are readily available. I have been researching this issue for a series of articles I’m writing for the Piano Technician’s Journal and what I’ve been learning is depressing at best. It’s not that we—the piano industry—are going through spruce trees faster than they can be grown but millions of spruce trees have been lost to unusually intense fires and spruce beetle infestations brought on by changes in the global climate. Add to that the fact that countries like China have exhausted most of their productive forest lands due to thoroughly inept forest management policies and that much of the productive forest lands of Russia are being illegally logged off at a rate that is controlled only by the physical capacity of the rail lines running between the forests and the railheads just inside the Chinese border.

True, some of these forests can and will be restored over time. But the trees from which we get our tonewoods have to reach 60 to 80 years of age before they start growing the wood we have traditionally regarded as tonewood. Unfortunately it is spruce trees over 40 to 50 years of age that the spruce beetle finds most tasty.

ddf

Yes, there is widespread depletion of forests, but I remember seeing photos back in the 80's of massive underground storage facilities used in Japan and several other countries where they had many years earlier begun to hoarde/store rare species of wood, primarily for the musical instrument manufacturing. I doubt there is any regulatory process that documents how much of this wood still remains but one cannot rule out large companies having the foresight to sit on huge quantities of it for future trading/use...or to artificially create shortfalls and increased demand/price for the product.

Yes, they are stored away there with our nickel candy bars that cost $0.05, our $0.04 cent per gallon gasoline, and our jet packs.

The current and coming shortfalls are not artificial.

ddf

Trees ARE a renewable resource, you know.

Yes, but you can cut them down much faster than you can grow them. Who would invest in a spruce forest when, in the meantime, someone might come up with soundboard laminates that do better for half the cost?

So is oil. You just have to compress large amounts of organic matter for thousands of years. Simple.

Ok, a joke, but saying something is renewable isn't the end of the discussion. Rates of growth, consumption, and cost (resource and financial) matter too. Something may be renewable, but that doesn't mean it is practical to do so, or will be done effectively. Especially where that renewal takes over 100 years. I'm not sure you read Del's description of the kind of spruce that is useful for piano soundboards. Or maybe you are joking? I can't tell...

I just said trees are a renewable resource.

Using plywood or not is a matter of religion. I had suggest many friends using digital piano, but parents say I am crazy. They buy expensive 30 years old recycled Yamaha, and never tune the piano. They believe only Yamaha is must for piano exam. It's nearly impossible to make people believe plywood has sound quality same as natural hard wood. I say hare wood, not spruce, because people believe hard wood is better.

And while we are on the subject of sounding bad. In the long ago past I would condemn a piano from Asia for sounding bad when honestly, with experience, came to find out that the petrified felt brand hammers were a massive amount of the bad I was hearing.
Apply a hammer transplant appropriate to the soundboard system and , viola!, a decent sound coming from a Spruce board.
We jokingly called these pianos Young CCClangs,or Sam-ickks et.only to find out later many were just a hammer and bass string set away from being legitimate instruments.
Dale Erwin
aka tone warrior

Sigh. I hear this all the time from people who think their personal instant gratification is more important than anyone else’s current or future desires and/or needs. Yes, trees are a renewable resource. All it takes is a lot of space and time and we’re running short of both.

It takes only 20 to 40 years to grow certain species that can then be cut for optimal fiber yield. Wonderful! A readily renewable resource. Assuming we’re after pallets or wood chips and pulp that’s the end of the discussion. Still, it does raise a couple of questions such as, if you think folks are upset over the heretical notion of finding a laminated soundboard in their piano what do you think they are going to say about that nice MDF soundboard. Or that wonderful OSB soundboard.

The problem for the piano industry is that it takes longer than 20 to 40 years to grow a tree of the type from which we get our tone wood. Do the math—it’s fairly simple. Let’s assume we want vertical-grain boards with a fairly conservative 10 annular grains per inch (a grain width of 2.5 mm). We have to leave out the first roughly 50 or 60 years’ worth of growth—the tree’s diameter is still only 10” to 12” (≈250 to 30. cm)—before it can start producing the wood that might ultimately end up being suitable for a piano soundboard. Assuming we want a board width of just 4” (≈100 mm) we have to wait a minimum of another 40 years. Of course, it would be very inefficient—as in wasteful—to cut the tree at this point so we’ll want to wait a while longer—say, another 30 or 40 years—before we start cutting. And that assumes the spruce beetles don’t take it out first. It also assumes somebody finds it either interesting enough or profitable enough to actually let trees grow that long in a maximum fiber yield society.

So, technically, spruce trees capable of producing tonewoods suitable for piano soundboard production are a renewable resource. So what? We’re never going to see them; none of us are going to be around that long. When the current supply is gone, for us they are gone for good.

ddf

Most of those Samicks had laminated spruce boards.

ddf

hi del!

do you happen to know if the spruce beetle epidemic is also going on in central european forests?

also do you happen to know how climate change is affecting or is predicted to affect high quality spruce forests--if at all?

here in montana the beetle epidemic has rushed on at a frightening pace, however, we had a really good year for rain, and it seems to be making the trees healthier and more resistant to the beetle. the beetle attacks are cyclical and won't last much longer.

(the spruce that grows here is absolutely worthless for piano soundboards anyway.)

Having such distinguished posters on this thread, would a new thread about these subjects be helpful?

A sticky type thread with very useful information about the resources needed to build a piano today?

Then another thread about alternatives?

Whatever, I really enjoy reading this forum.

Personally, on my dream lightweight beautiful sounding piano, the tuning system would be a screw stringer type.

I know it has affected forests in Russia. As far as I know it is a problem worldwide. It rather depends on the type of forest. The spruce beetle was never a problem for the Sitka spruce that grew within the old-growth forests. The ecological diversity in the rest of the forest protected the spruce. But the old-growth forests are gone.



Yes, climate change has been accelerating spruce beetle activity. In Alaskan forests the spruce beetle has had a two-year life cycle. With the much warmer temperatures in the areas where spruce forests have grown this is changing to a one-year cycle. From 1987 to 1997 spruce beetles took out an area the size of Connecticut.

For us in the piano industry the bad news—aside from the loss of huge areas of spruce forests—is the fact that the spruce beetle goes after the oldest and largest trees, the very trees that are used for soundboard production. This leaves conditions ideal for rapid growth of the survivors; exactly what we don’t want for soundboard production.

ddf

Del, call me crazy, but I really don't think the planet is going to run out of trees. I respect you and your work and share your enthusiasm for pianos, piano design, and tone, but I believe wood is a basic necessity of civilization and that the planet has more than enough to accommodate.

loren, on what facts do you base your assumption?

did you know that north africa at one time was forested?

now it's a desert.

did you know that 300 years ago or so, europe was essentially completely deforested? europeans were so desperate to get their trees back, they created highly rigorous forestry programs that very slowly regenerated their forests.

despite the lesson of europe, we're destroying forests at a much higher rate today than they did, worldwide. find out what is happening in brazil, in alaska, in british columbia.

that's all without discussing forests that produce trees that are suitable for pianos, which is a minuscule number. the last great repositories of those trees are gone in most parts of the world, and those that remain--for example, on state lands in washington state (though possibly even those are all gone now)--are being decimated by beetles even as they are heavily logged.

you can't grow trees suitable for pianos in rows like a corn crop, on a 40 or 50 or even 60 year cycle. you do that for making toilet paper and OSB. and there's no economic incentive for anyone to grow them on a longer cycle, if they are in business.

i'm curious to know if the situation is as dire in central european forests, where trees are very carefully managed to exacting standards. but those forests represent a very tiny resource if they are to be harvested sustainably. i should think that they aren't a large enough resource to build all the world's pianos.

what happens to the soils when forests are leveled? who is going to regrow forests for long enough and with what profit motive? it's a very complex subject. it's not so simple as saying you can grow more trees.

I stopped listening to a conversation once when I heard, "That second growth forest will never come back."

This is not strictly true. If you think you will be able to sell your forest of piano trees at a profit to another long term investor it will be worth the investment. But how do you prove you have an appreciating asset?

Source?

Have you actually read any of what I’ve written on the subject? Where have I said the planet was running out of trees? I have said the planet was running out of the types—sizes, grain, etc.—of trees we think we need for piano soundboard panels.

And we probably won’t completely run out of those. There will remain some few carefully managed forests capable of keeping growth rates slow and decades—a century or so—long but they will be small and the cost will be too high for entry-level and (probably) for many mid-level pianos.

ddf

Actually you can. There are several such operations thriving not all that far from where I live. Various genetically-enhanced varieties of poplar and several other species are being grown for pulp and oriented strand board.

It’s just that none of these trees will be at all suitable for piano soundboard panel construction.

ddf

Who said that? If I did it was a misstatement. Of course we will have second-growth forests. And third and fourth and ad nauseam …. What we won’t have—barring a population die-off of biblical scale—will be commercially viable old-growth forests. We obtained our wonderful, two- and three-hundred year old slow growth Sitka spruces from the old-growth forests of the Pacific NW. We get shipping pallets and oriented strand board from plantation-growth mono-culture forests.

ddf

um, please re-read my first sentence. does it not say *suitable for pianos* ?

Del, some people that you never met had the conversation. It was about how one of them and a buddy were snowmobiling on timber land (a courtesy granted by a large timber company) and they suddenly came upon a second growth area that had been clear-cut. The guy said that this second growth forest would never grow back. And I stopped listening. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you!

The earth is self healing and life is incredibly adaptable. Some ding-dongs (not you) do not understand this. And humans are right in there with adaptability. We will adapt just fine with whatever-growth forests there may be and enjoy music just the same.

Seriously, I sometimes listen to “artificial” pianos on recordings and can tell the difference because of the smooth perfection in the high octaves. I have to chuckle when I hear the percussive key-noise added in so that it will sound like a real piano. I don’t think we will have much of a problem making non-wood soundboards that are too good to be true if the time comes.

Yes, it does. What it does not say is, “suitable for piano soundboards. Plantation-grown lumber is already being used for various parts of the piano both as solids and as a base for various manufactured materials such as MDF and particleboard.

OK, you can, perhaps legitimately, call this a too-subtle difference but which I see as quite significant. In fact it’s apparently so subtle that several folks in this conversation seem to have utterly missed it. Even with changing climates Earth will probably continue to provide us with trees of some kind. They won’t necessarily be of the size and species we’ve long been familiar, though. And tmay be growing in unfamiliar geographical areas as once-fertile areas become arid and growing conditions in other areas suddenly become lush and fertile. But they will undoubtedly grow. None of this is going to help the piano industry in the short term. However some would like to deny reality the real reality is going to continue to have its way and our forests are not going to be the same as they have been through most of our lifetimes.

ddf

Second growth forests certainly do grow back although it’s usually as a mono-culture. With conifers, however, there are differences in the character and “quality” of the timber.



Yes, Earth is self-healing. Sometimes, of course, the healing process is slow and painful and costly.

ddf

If I break my arm it will heal itself eventually. I prefer taking care not to break it in the first place...and I especially prefer that someone else not break it for me.

I feel much the same way about our planet.

The second growth will never grow back. What grows will then be third growth.

But silliness aside, there are areas here on Vancouver Island, one of the big timber locales on earth, where a forest, once logged in the "traditional" clear-cut method, will not grow back, at least not for a few centuries. Once steep hillsides have been denuded, the severe winter rains (up to and over 15 feet of precipitation) will wash the topsoil into the valleys below (destroying salmon habitat), leaving the slopes with not enough soil to sustain real trees. It will then take a very long time, perhaps centuries, for mosses, grasses, small plants and shrubs to build the soil back to a level where large trees can once again grow.

Yes, Europe and other places have destroyed vast areas of forests in past centuries; unfortunately North American logging practices have not learned much from that for a long time. Today, things are getting better, but what has been lost can never be replaced in a few generations.

you're right. i made the mistake of thinking that "soundboards" was implicit, since the topic we are discussing is soundboards.

i meant soundboards.

'zactly.

Yes

Tree's need a hug.

Well, it should be. But it seems no matter how explicit I am in describing the purpose—“solid” spruce soundboard stock—the trees age, growth characteristics and size folks will always come back with something like “but wood is a renewable resource.” And then we go through the whole thing again.

ddf

Nice try, but I am clearly stating my opinion and not representing it as fact. I said "I really don't think," while you simply made a declaration.

If I say "I think spruce trees are being consumed faster than they are being replaced," I'm stating my opinion. If I leave out the "I think" part, then I'm stating a fact that needs to be sourced.

Better luck next time. Btw, you never did provide that source.

On the fact that the planet is still here, we're all still alive, and despite the millionth time the sky was said to be falling, it hasn't.

So are you going to start living more like the Amish?

I remember watching a program on PBS about musical instrument making, a guy took the host to an old growth forest.. and he began to tap on the trees,and turned to the host and said
this is a good one! if it doesn't make a certain kind of sound its not "suitable" for instruments, this one's a keeper...
so folks not even every old spruce is suitable,we need to be ever mindful of that fact..
trees are a renewable resource..but not all are "soundboard" candidates..

Frustrating when people think their contrary opinion still matters against the face of a huge amount of scientific evidence. You have the right to your opinion, but when your opinion contradicts scientific evidence, that just betrays your ignorance

+10

Not at all. I still walk across the street going to lunch every day even though I might get hit by a car one day. But I do take care to wait until the light is in my direction.

I'm simply expressing a preference for those who cut down forests doing so in a reasonably prudent manner instead of doing whatever the heck they please and then saying "It'll grow back one day". That sort of fatuous excuse is typical of the justification given for all manner of idiotic short term thinking.

Not entirely so, but YES! I believe that it is in our own best interests and the interests of the planet as a whole that we simplify our lives (in certain ways.)
Now, I'm NOT going to wear those silly clothes!!!