Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Tuner-Technicians Forum Did Piano Makers lie about their designs and benefits?

I think you techs will be able to point this out to me more than anyone else. And it's not about spinets this time, heh. It's about piano makers as a whole. One can really go back in time and see all the funny names that piano makers tried to slap onto their piano's features. 'Pentagonal Soundboard', 'Augmented Soundboard', 'Acro Tone', 'Story Tone Soundboard...' I was looking through old 50s piano ads and saw some of these being pointed out. I would honestly like to know how much of this is BS, and how much of it is the actual truth. I'm certain it can't be all peaches and cream. To give an example:

Pin block: Pin Blocks used in Such And Such (I'm sure you can guess what maker this was from, lol.) Pianos are made of five laminations of selected northern rock maple and are of grand type construction. They are slowly and thoroughly seasoned to assure permanent setting of the pins.

Nowie, the question is...did makers back then really tell the truth about what was going into their pianos? Wow, look at me, questioning my apple pie and malt shop American pianos. I suppose I can believe this, but the doubt is bugging me.
So........true, or lies for economic gain? I don't think the average person would question this, but then again, I'm not an average person. Are phrases like 'tone crafted hammers' and such just one of the many things that the many makers tried to draw in the public? Or did they each actually do something?
Thanks.

The vast majority of these terms fall under the "let's give unique names to all of the features in our piano that we can think of so as to justify the jobs of the sales department".

A lot of it - most of it, probably - was (and still is) marketing hype. There might be some minor technical innovation involved, generally speaking, but it was generally a slight variation on a standard theme.

The classic example is the term "Upright Grand." The reasoning behind this term was that a full upright had the equivalent string lengths and sound board area of a 6ft grand, so there was an additional similarity. What it really was was just a marketing term to sell more uprights. I find it amusing that the term was coined something like 125 years ago, and people still fall for it today; just skim through the Craigslist ads and you'll see.

A more recent phrase seen might be "Concert Vertical."

The one I liked was "Mezo Thermoneal Stabilizer". I never really found the origin of that one. 'Seemed to me that it was Kimball's fancy word for a wood drying kiln.

Yep! That's written on an official
Kimball sticker on my piano!

I have several Story & Clark pianos That I service that claim to be "The only piano specifically designed for churches." They all have the fancy carved crosses on the side." Decent pianos I guess, except for the fact that most of them have loose tuning pins in the bass.

In a PTG class taught by the late, great, Roger Weisensteiner of Kimball-he was asked about the "Mezzo-Thermoneal Stabilizer". He described it as a 120F oven the strung back was put into after chip tuning.

I couldn't resist a follow up question. I asked "I have always wanted to know if it was fusion or fission powered?" Laughs did follow but not from Roger. I always felt bad after that because Roger was the nicest guy.

Ah! That's what it was. The strung backs were "Oven Tempered for Flexible Strength". (apologies to the old Reynolds Wrap aluminum foil adds) 'Humor regret ... we all have it from time to time.

I used to teach several units about advertising. We looked at adverts from the late 1800s before advertising was regulated.

People made all sorts of false claims about lots of things, expecially medicines! The Carrs Carbolic Smoke Ball case saw the start of some control on advertising in the UK. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlill_v_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Company

Nowadays in most contries advertising at least has to tell the truth. But of course there are ways of using words to make things sound better.

In the UK, a classic sign of a cheap and nasty 1890s upright, is a black and gold tranfer saying something like "Upright Iron Grand" and "Full trichord Check Action".

In the 1920s and 1930s terms appeared like "Resonoura" to describe oddly shapeed upright top lids etc.

A ploy which continues today, is the suggestion with small to medium grands that because of X or Y design feature, the piano has the attributes of a larger grand.

Introducing The New & Improved Sonoriaganza by Heaven Harp, Inc.

Don't let the 4'-3" diminutive size fool you. With the addition of our Miraculous Divination Enhancer (patent pending), you shall experience the Voice of God as if spoken through a 9' Concert Piano.

Matching fainting couch, and smelling salts available through your local dealer.

Marty, have you been snorting that cold MN air again?

Right now, the temp being what it is, you snort, you die!

My god, Marty, this. This is just lol. There is just so much lols, I can't even comprehend the lols. I'll need that couch for sitting down because my stomach hurts from laughing. I'm serious.

Take even, deep breaths, Wurli. You'll be OK until you remember it in a movie theater and start laughing all over again!

Actually it was an environmental chamber the strung backs would go through on a conveyor that heated them to some outlandish temperature and then cooled them to some relatively low temperature. I don't remember the actual temperatures. It was intended to stress the wood and glue joints -- however briefly -- beyond anything that would typically be found in a normal home environment.

As to whether this actually did them any good is another question entirely.

ddf

Back when I was at Baldwin the folks in Cincinnati hired someone who had just been granted a patent for some kind of audio testing equipment. He had presented this equipment, along with his expertise, to devise a method of testing by which Baldwin pianos would always be proven to be superior to anything else on the market.

Along with the head of Baldwin's engineering department I was given the unenviable task of escorting this gentleman through both the vertical and grand plants. It quickly became apparent that he knew nothing at all about Baldwin pianos specifically or about the piano industry generally.

This was no hindrance, of course, and he continually pressed us to list details and specifications proving that Baldwin pianos were the very best pianos in the world. Ultimately we explained that the reason we couldn't do this was quite simple: Baldwin pianos were not the best pianos in the world and no test he could come up with was going to change that.

We thought that was the end of the story -- But, wait! There's more! Undaunted by reality he went back to Cincinnati and sold someone back there on the idea of detecting the motion of the soundboard with accelerometers, amplifying that signal and feeding it back to the soundboard via a large transducer which was supposed to "amplify" the sound and was surely going to make a 36" Acrosonic sound just as good as a concert grand.

The way we heard the story over drinks in a bar some years later it became a classic example of, "If at first you don't succeed, get a bigger hammer." Since the first relatively small transducers had virtually no effect increasingly larger and more powerful units were installed until, ultimately, the bass bridge was ripped off the soundboard.

It was about this time that someone finally called us to find out what was going wrong and, after a discussion about a couple of fundamental laws of physics, the project was abandoned.

ddf

Don't you mean "remember it during a solemn classical concert in a Catholic church", or something like that?

The phrase always intrigued and amused me slightly, so I watched the Kimballs that I tuned. I honestly couldn't tell any difference between the Mezo pianos and the lesser run-of-the-mill pianos. 'Fun word though.

I suspect it was a process intended to cause potential defects to show up during the production process (where they could easily be fixed) rather than out in some customer's home (where repairs would be significantly more difficult and expensive). Outside of actually working in the factory there is no way to tell if this helped or not.

I can't see it having any effect at all on the performance of the finished piano. But without being able to run a series of side-by-side comparisons involving a rather large number of otherwise "identical" instruments there is no way to definitively prove this one way or the other.

ddf