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I would offer up any number of recordings that were made on Grandpianoman's Mason & Hamlin a few years back in an unequal temperament in comparison.

How about this one?

https://app.box.com/s/q7vosp2amts8b83kuy8t

I would add that it is in a key that is not supposed to work in non-ET. The very reason why such a temperament should never be chosen!

It shan't be the first time that a good product has assumed room temperature in the house of its "friends." Sadly, it won't be the last. We are loosing, incrementally, the ability to discern aurally the difference between good, real acoustic tone and imitation. The result, I think, of overexposure en masse to, and desensitization via, "ever-improving" synthetic or imitative sound. In this New World, it is imagined that plastic "pianos" will be "tuned" by a Robot ETD-in-a-box. But even that may prove to be too slow, costly and complicated for Instant Society. Are not plans underway to effectively cram everything - "piano," lessons, sheet music, and "tuner" into a single smarty phone app with synthetic sound and virtual goggles?

"We believe that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take something away from the man." - Sojef

Bill, I enjoyed that Clair de Lune very much; thank you for posting the link. I know that I could listen to that piano for hours, which is not the case with every piano.

I'm not sure about the Bogányi instrument. I think I'd like to hear a recording in a drier acoustic environment.

bkw58 I don't know if I entirely agree with Sojef's aphorism. Might depend what work you're building the machine for. If you build a machine to plough a man's field (or a woman's) you might free him (or her) to write music.

I've said it before you need to hear and try an instrument in person. You cannot judge a piano from a recording.

LJC, you can!

It's a mistake to suppose that all piano "consumption" is by individuals playing their own instruments. Of course I totally agree that if one is buying a piano to play, it's absolutely essential to try them out in person to find the one that suits, within the budget.

But most "consumption" of piano music, surely, is in recordings?

I love the piano and piano repertoire. Sadly, when I grew up in the 60s piano lessons were not much in fashion, and there wasn't much spare cash about, so I didn't have piano lessons and can't play, except for a few tunes I've memorised note by note from the sheet music (I can't play 'by ear' at all).

I love to go to piano recitals, and have heard some very fine pianists play live. But the hours of my life spent at live recitals pale into insignificance compared to the multitude of hours I've spent listening to piano recordings; on 78rpm shellac discs, on vinyl LPs, on cassette tapes, on CDs, on MP3 and MP4 etc.

Recording music is a MAJOR use of the piano. I judge the pianos I hear in recordings.

Dear David, Sorry I cannot agree. i have heard too many recordings of pianos that I thought sounded great only to find that in person they didn't sound near as good as the recording.

Yes, it is interesting. Of course Richard Dain and Udo Steingraeber have been building pianos with carbon fiber for some years now.

It does seem to use some type of bridge agrafe but then those have been around for over a hundred years now.

ddf

I think maybe we're slightly at cross purposes, and that I am also straying a little into the field of sound recordings.

I have not heard live, almost any of the pianos I have got on CD. Of course I have heard lots of live pianos, some fabulous, some less so. The Steinway Ds in Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and Glasgow CIty Halls are beautifully tuned and maintained by Alistair McLean and are a pleasure to hear live. I don't think I have any recordings of them. I may have some Wigmore Hall recordings of pianos I have heard live there.

But my point was about piano "consumption". The majority of my 'serious' piano listening is to sound recordings on CD. If they sound gorgeous, does it matter if the instrument 'in person' sounds less gorgeous, if I am never going to hear them live?

Conversely, if a top-notch gorgeous live piano is poorly recorded and sounds bad, I won't listen to the CD.

I have a CD of two-piano four hands music, transcriptions of music of Arthur Benjamin. The pianos are a Steinway and a Bosendorfer. One is predominantly left channel and the other right channel. It is very easy to judge correctly every time, which is which.


I totally agree that if one is contemplating a piano for purchase, the only way to judge it is to try it. Even then, it may sound very different indeed in your house from how it sounds in someone else's.

I think perhaps this discussion comes down to what is meant by "judge".

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I tuned a Broadwood upright a couple of years back that was of heavy contruction and had bridge agraffes. I will try and find the pics. I was a between the wars piano I think.

Del, I have posted a small album of pics of the Broadwood upright with bridge agraffes on my facebook business Page, at https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.797258013672861.1073741875.244714395593895&type=3

Thanks. Those look similar to one of the types I've seen on a U.S. built upright (the name of which escapes me at the moment). In your opinion how did these work? They leave the strings unclamped but I don't recall that being a problem with the piano I tuned. There were so many things wrong with this piano it was difficult to tell how it may have sounded when newer and in better condition.

ddf

You can hear things in a recording. In the recording here, I will tell you the things I think I can hear:

1) The tone tries to be smooth from the top of the scale to the bottom. It's not like a Steinway that tries to have a rich colorful tenor. It's like a Steingraeber, that tries to be clear and even all the way down.

2) The hammers sound soft to me. I say that based on the tone immediately when the string is struck. You can listen for this.

3) The piano does sound energetic and fun to play.

4) The sustain seems to last a lot longer on the lower end of the piano than on the higher end.

4) Does the piano have a slight brittle sound in the sustain, or is that my imagination?

There is a better recording here. The first thing you will notice is the heavy reverb, you'll need to listen past that.

I am fully willing to accept that I may be wrong on any of these observations, and certainly there are tricks you can play with a recording studio to hide flaws, but that doesn't mean we can't try to listen to it in a recording, especially since that's all we have.

It sounded brittle to me in the upper register and also flat. The whole thing sounded muffled compared to the recording Grandpianman made of the same piece of music with his home equipment.

Those bridge agraffes I saw in the pictures looked like the repair agraffes that supply houses used to sell for repairing split bridges. Not anything I would ever use. Any piano I ever saw with bridge agraffes was a dog! I certainly would never want to string one.

How do bridge agraffes compare with the highly touted Wapin retrofit? You are supposed to pay a fee just to put another bridge pin in the middle of the bridge. I wonder if anyone ever did that without paying that fee? They produced CD's of that too but I could never hear any remarkable difference. Grandpianoman's piano does have that, however but I could never notice any particular effect from that alone.

Then there was this guy with his granite bridges. He sure was pushing them for a while. Who wouldn't want to buy that? But looks like nobody did.

Then how about that Baldwin Acrosonic? They built them all the way from the 1930's until whenever they went out of business. Any number of people told them how they could improve the scale design but they never did. Recently, I tuned a baby grand with the name, D.H. Baldwin on it, presumably built in China and what did I see? A horizontal Acrosonic!

Ah, yes. The Chicago PTG hosted him for one of our chapter meetings. A demo piano was there; I thought the bridge pinning was rather sloppy. He wasn't really well received. I got the sense that he didn't understand why his piano sounded the way it did. I'm willing to bet one could get near identical results by using Delignit bridge cap and mass-load the bridge along its length, with brass.

Including at least one person who worked there.

ddf

It was unhappiness with the sound of that very piece in ET that led me to explore unequal temperaments in the first place for my Chickering concert grand, even though the ET on it was about the best I've ever heard, put on it by a well-respected name in the business. I tried several well temperaments but was only happy with that piece when I adopted EBVT. Only then did that piece sound as it does in my mind's ear of the ideal. I haven't budged off of it since. That key *only* sounds right to me in that temperament.

As to that "revolutionary piano"--if that's the sound of the revolution, I'll join the White Army. God save the Tsar.

One man's "clear" is another man's "thin". And that really is about the thinnest sound I've heard from a piano of that size. It sounds somewhere in between a harpsichord and an early forte-piano with a hint of clavichord. I listened to all the pieces on the website, some of which I've played frequently for the last ten years so they're beyond familiar. (I listened on a system with 6 amps totalling 7,000 watts at .005 THD, driving six Acoustat X's and four JBL studio monitors. The system is in the same room as the concert grand and is calibrated to replicate recordings of that instrument accurately, with the hope that other recordings follow suit--I think they do, as artists I've heard on stage,live and pre-amplification also sound entirely accurate on it).

That leaves only the caveat of studio production accuracy, and I'll assume *that* met the maker's approval, since those recordings are on his own website to promote his "sound".

My conclusion is that even if that piano were not $250,000, I wouldn't give it any of my floorspace. Thin to the point of brittle. If that's what $250K buys, I'll keep my 120-year-old Chickering or buy a Fazioli.

That was my impression as well. I believe pretty much the gist of his reasoning was that granite was best "because it's natural." His childishly combative responses on here did him no favors either.

I found some better recordings here, I had to right-click and download them because they wouldn't play in my browser. (that is the most fortissimo interpretation of Bach I've ever heard on a piano, no delicate clavichord there! But maybe it's not wrong, since Bach sure loved a powerful organ). I had two new observations:

1) The notes have a slight hum (can anyone else hear it, or is it only me?) that makes me feel like it is slightly out of tune, but it's not. I think that is coming from the carbon fiber soundboard. That would drive me crazy very quickly if I owned the piano.

2) The piano seems to have a gentle, flexible power. I would like to try it out for this alone, to see what I could do with it. I'm assuming this is because Renner did good work on the action.

I think Bill is right that the upper register is surprisingly weak.

Sohmer perhaps?

Given the instruments of the period, I don't think Bach was interested in mixing metaphors of trying to get a powerful "organ-like" sound from anything other than an organ. The other non organ keyboard works, those intended to be on a harpsichord or clavichord (not a modern piano), reflect the delicacy of those instruments in tone, touch, and sustain.