Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Thoughts on Baldwin "D" 9 foot Concert Grand 1928

Hardly. Sometimes, the cost of a new board outweighs the benefits. However, this does not mean that the board is not compromised. While there are techniques that can improve the function of old soundboards, I'd be hard pressed to not replace one in a 9' Baldwin.

So Beet986, it's your M.O. to just arbitrarily replace all old soundboards? How many boards have you replaced personally over the last couple years that bolster this position? I think that if this were the case, all vintage pianos other than Steinways,Masons and some Baldwins would likely go to the dumpster, and the sad pathetic truth is that that would be ridiculous and quite a waste really. Each board should be evaluated on a case by case basis and it is really quite easy to tell what you have prior to a teardown. I realize that it's nice to sell such a job to Joe consumer, but whether it would actually make a difference to Joe consumer is another matter. The little 6' Lester I just rebuilt sings like crazy. It would have been such a shame to have hauled it to the dump because Beeth986 thinks it needs a new board. It's a 6' piano that I would guarantee would fill virtually any normal sized living room with sufficient and pleasant sound...that certainly would NOT have benefitted much from a new board. I have replaced/rebuilt soundboards on two pianos in the last 20 years, one on a Steinway that had no crown and one on a Weber that disassembled itself when unstrung...the ribs actually popped off the board. Like I said, they should be evaluated on a case by case basis.

Please take a few deep breaths, go back to my last post, and re-read what I wrote. Thank you.

The last three concert grands I tuned, in a space of a couple of days, all had their original boards, and I would defy anyone to tell which board was 80 years old, which was 55 years old, and which was 6 years old solely from the sound of the pianos.

beeth986, I have since taken a few breaths, but my question still remains namely how many soundboards have you evaluated or replaced in the last two years? How many soundboards have you repaired in that same time frame that have allowed you the latitude to make pronouncements publicly that will lend creedence to your opinion. I realize that in the best of all possible worlds people will have boatloads of cash to spend indiscriminately on whatever their heart's desire or flavor of the day. I live in realville however and that is not necessarily an option, nor is it necessarily a sound moral approach to dictating replacement. I am rebuilding a Mason CC2 for personal use. It had one small soundboard crack. I guess that since it's 50 years old (according to you) it should have been replaced, but most folks that have heard it, believe it's so powerful it will likely loosen the plaster in my living room. It's a personal piano and I can easily afford to buy it a new board. I DIDN'T!! It would have been a total waste of money. I just acquired a 7'4" Weber that has a soundboard with one major crack. It dates to 1912 or thereabouts. It has one of the most amazing bass registers I have ever heard and certainly the rival of any Steinway B or C that I have heard. The treble has great clarity and sustain. By your reckoning, I should just disregard the present level of performance and arbitrarily replace it. There's likely no financial gain to be had and really no guarantee that it will sound better than it already does. With the board it has it will make a marvelous instrument for any serious pianist that chooses to acquire it. Will it last another 100 years? I don't know that the new board would last 100 years. I am going to stick with my approach which is to evaluate crown and bearing and just how does it actually sound through all registers.

John, Those little Lester Grands can be surprising.

I understand just fine, thank you. I understand some soundboard systems tend to deteriorate over time and I understand why others do not. I also understand why a lot of otherwise great old pianos that have been rebuilt with those original boards you’re so in love with end up later with performance deemed unsatisfactory by their owners. Sadly by the time the figure out their rebuilder didn’t know what he was talking about they spent their money and are stuck with the results.

You claim there are “thousands of successfully restored old pianos with original soundboards that cannot be discerned from new pianos by the way they sound” and you have the audacity to write that I make unsubstantiated claims! I am sick and tired of finding unmusical pianos in client’s homes (sometimes in my shop) that have been rebuilt by some quack rebuilder who has hang-ups about “authenticity”—The soundboard, after all, is the “soul” of the piano, right?—or who simply can’t be bothered to learn enough about the structure of wood and its behavior over time or about soundboard design and construction to be able to tell the difference. According to these people no board ever goes bad and that is simply wrong. These people take people’s money and, while they might do a lot of otherwise decent work, they send back pianos that will never produce the sound quality the owners wanted and were led to expect because sometimes those old soundboards have deteriorated and are incapable of ever producing decent sound new strings and hammers notwithstanding and the rebuilder just didn’t know any better. Didn’t’ stop them from taking the money, though.

ddf

Which just means that some soundboards do not necessarily degrade with age. Others do. It helps to understand why some do and some don't and how to tell the difference.

ddf

And I've encountered to high-end instruments—one 7' and one 9' grand—that are less than five years old in which the soundboards have already deteriorated to the point that tone quality has suffered. One of them has already had new strings through the upper tenor/lower treble section along with new hammers. Now a third set of hammers is being considered. Anything to avoid acknowledging that the soundboard has failed.

At the other extreme I tuned an old 9’ Chickering 141 last Saturday that is pretty much clapped out—it received a horrible rebuilding 20 or 30 years ago and pretty much everything is shot except for the soundboard. That is doing just fine.

ddf

That just proves that deterioration of soundboards is not inevitable. Which was my point. When some wet behind the ears kid comes along and pronounces that a piano that he has never heard before needs a new soundboard, people should know that it ain't necessarily so.

I think you are misinterpreting what I wrote... perhaps my fault for not being clear enough, but regardless: Obviously, the vast majority of pianos out there are not going to merit new soundboards just in the same way that most are not going to merit new key sets; afterall, who is going to pay $50,000 for a totally rebuilt Steiff or Chickering when you can get a Steinway or Mason & Hamlin for maybe a little bit more? But that still doesn't mean that their soundboards aren't compromised, or won't be in the future. With all the fantastic people designing and building really excellent soundboards now, my philosophy at the moment is why risk it unless you have no other choice?

With pianos made by prestigious brands, I think one is at a huge disadvantage for not replacing the board most of the time. I've come across many rebuilds over the years that just didn't cut it, largely because the soundboard was not replaced. Most recently, I saw a beautiful looking Knabe art case concert grand.... until you looked inside it and saw an old, oxidized board with many shims. Ugly. It also had poor sustain.

I've seen a few pianos that were successfully rebuilt with original boards. All of them were free of cracks (or carefully shimmed), bleached, epoxied as per Del's method, and stiffened with auxiliary riblets. Still, I am naturally wary of pianos with original soundboards because of the encounters I've had with original soundboards.

Ahhhhh. Ageism. My favorite! You are as rude as you are inaccurate.

Should I replace the soundboard in my Lester spinet?

Oops, wrong forum...

Beeth986, there is really nothing much anectdotal in your previous responses.I believe that your hands-on experience in either installing or rebuilding soundboards to be limited. We all suffer that to a greater or lesser degree, but I think your opinion might change over time as you work through the rebuilding process time and again. All used pianos could benefit from new soundboards just as all used cars could likely benefit from new engines. I have had cars that ran fabulously for 300K miles, just as I have had 100 year old pianos with good soundboards. I have also seen cars with 12K miles that needed new engines and Del has recently opined that he has seen fairly new pianos needing boards. As I have opined many times, in each of these instances, it's not the age, it's the mileage and each specimen needs to be evaluated on its merits or lack thereof.

There is nothing said by anyone yet on this topic that has swayed me from that opinion.

Fair enough. As long as it is also understood that when some anonymous, self-described “Semi-Pro Tech” with no hands-on soundboard experience says that all old piano soundboards regardless of design or construction never need to be replaced it also ain’t necessarily so.

ddf

I have 22 years of experience playing pianos, and six of those were in a conservatory. I've seen thousands of pianos in that amount of time, so I do have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn't. I'm also a Guild member, and I've worked in two shops whose owners have extensive soundboard experience (as in building them from scratch). Am I a master soundboard craftsman? No. But, I'm hardly "wet behind the ears" as others have suggested, and I'm more than qualified to have an opinion. We can play the "who has more experience game" all day, but who benefits from that?

Beeth,everyone is qualified to have an opinion, and a public forum is proof of that. There is a quantum difference in playing and rebuilding. I have been playing for 51 years, 7 of those in a conservatory setting. Our college creds are all but identical. All the playing I did helped me to know what I enjoyed playing, but yielded little as to how to achieve same, though the college offered a tech class which I took, but was basically an intro 101 style class. Since I was already on good terms with the tech at the college, he didn't have any problems with me rebuilding my action from my personal Baldwin grand and that was a nice way to begin.

"Seeing thousands" isn't like disassembling and coming to terms with anything, so I believe this point to be overstated. I am quite certain that most forum members have also seen thousands, but I wouldn't go running to any of them necessarily to solve any technical issues or to proffer an educated opinion about same. I believe that knowledge should be largely anecdotal, otherwise one is just professing things he has heard second-hand but not actually experienced. All information we receive one way or the other is not necessarily good info. I'll give you a personal example. When I was taking a rebuilding class and rebuilding my first piano (Knabe D), I was advised to recap the treble bridge. I carefully made a cardboard template and then was advised to freehand the drilling process. At the time, this seemed counterintuitive, but hey the teaching honcho is a well-recognized "Guild" member after all, and he wouldn't steer me wrong....would he? Well, the weakest part of my piano is still the upper treble. My solution for the next great project a year later an early Baldwin D was to create a drilling jig that would duplicate the compound angles needed for a factory-like execution. Needless to say the Baldwin sang as it should and had a very strong and clear upper register...along with every other register (despite that original soundboard of course). My point is, you can't believe everything you are told even if it comes from some vaunted PTG member. You need to get your hands dirty and analyze things and come up with solutions. From these experiences come opinions based on first-hand data.

Since, I was never convinced at the time that the execution of the treble bridge was correct with my original Knabe, I kept the template. When I finish the Mason, the Knabe will come apart and then we'll see if that upper treble can be improved some.

The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know and a bit of humility comes from that reality...hopefully. You would be surprised how effective this forum can be, the only problem is that this info is sometimes propagated as gospel and much is far from gospel worthy. I don't want the opinion that all used pianos need new soundboards to be propagated as gospel because it couldn't be further from the truth. I want every piano to be analyzed on its merits alone which has been my position since day one.

Of course it's not the same, and I wasn't trying to say it was. You asked what my experience was, so I told you.




But the thing is, is that I didn't say they should be. My original comment was that soundboards degrade over time; it is generally agreed that this is true, certainly in the part of the country I'm from. However, I know that doesn't automatically mean that all of them need to be gutted because I've seen them successfully reused, or because it's just not financially feasible.

I also said that I would be hard pressed to not replace the soundboard in a 9' Baldwin. The key words here are "I", as in me, personally, and "hard pressed", which is strongly leaning in a certain direction, but certainly not an absolute.


Why do I feel this way?:
1. This is a valuable, performance oriented piano.

2. Soundboards deteriorate, especially in my native climate, so this is what I'm going to naturally expect, unless I see otherwise.

3. Building off #2, this is an 84 year old piano, not a 30 year old piano. How is that soundboard going to look and sound in another 84?

4. The expectation that the soundboard be replaced is, as far as I can tell, becoming the norm among high-end clients.

5. Cosmetics. If you're going to pay big money for a big piano and you spend $9000--or whatever the cost may be--to do a nice hand-rubbed lacquer finish on a concert grand, you're going to want that sparkling white soundboard, like all the other ones you're looking at on eBay or Pianomart.

5. The possibility of improving upon the original design.


With regard to the OP's situation, he said that the person who rebuilt the piano claimed the soundboard is in "perfect condition". Of course the rebuilder is going to say that, no? That's a conflict of interest if you ask me, so I feel that saying the rebuilder's claim ain't necessarily so was perfectly justified.

I've been playing for 26 years, 8 of those in a conservatory setting and many on a concert stage. On old pianos that I felt were lacking, I couldn't be sure if it was the fault of the action, strings, soundboard or a combination of the poor thing being tired out in general.

I know I've played a couple of rebuilt pianos with original boards that, given the action parts and strings used, should have sounded amazing but didn't. I've played many rebuilt pianos with new soundboards that sounded beautiful, I've played a few rebuilt pianos with original boards that sounded beautiful, and some completely original pianos from 120 years ago that sounded beautiful - although many of these original instruments sound weak and difficult to play.

Having read back over the last paragraph, I realise that all of the rebuilt pianos I've played with new soundboards sounded beautiful where as only some of the pianos I played with original boards did.