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I felt the actions were better than ever.
Tighter, without being heavier.
More responsive and sensitive.

Thanks Kenny, Bernard, and Joe.

Sounds like y'all had a good time. Sorry the rest of us missed it.

I think the two spruces he was comparing were northern European and northern North American stock, which he felt was more or less the same stock, citing the fact that Europe only separated from the Americas some 20,000 or so years ago (I made up that number, but you get my drift - continentally speaking that isn ). And yes, Bernard, he definitely had very low regard for sitka (sp?) which is apparently used in a lot of cheaper pianos. I don't even know what that is - some kind of pine I guess? Other than that, I don't remember other woods he mentioned for the soundboards.

The earphones were very helpful, especially in noisy spots and I'm sure to Bruce, so he didn't have to shout to an ever wandering group, and often over the din of machinery. We do sort of look like a bunch of nerds with those things on, though. (Then again, we had two Nerds amongst us!) And they did cut down on our chit chatting - which has its pluses and minuses.

Cecil was a very engaging, fun guy, who could play some mean lounge music. And he says he doesn't read music! I am envious.

As to comparing the pianos, all I can say is that they sounded beautiful, mellow, sonorous when being played on by others, and felt very much the same, with nice, responsive action when I played on them.

My first "hearing" was when the professor from Washington was playing on one while we were finishing up with lunch. He was doing some quiet Chopin and the sound was so beautiful, I had to stop talking and just take it in.

As to comparing the models as I played, I find that doing so is like comparing perfumes. After three or so, my head is in a muddle, and I start forgetting what's what. Suffice it to say, from my not so refined technique, they are gorgeous pianos.

Miscellaneous notes on the M&H factory tour:

The People

This section is about the "blue collar" craftsmen who build the M&H pianos (you can read about their leaders and their visionaries HERE ).

1. Most of the craftsmen are of Chinese descend. All four rim-bending craftsmen, the craftsman doing down bearing, the bridge notcher, the stringer, and the two craftspersons assembling the action we saw that day were all of Chinese descend. Most of them did not speak English well. On the first floor hung a "translation board" that has English and Chinese names of piano parts as well as other English/Chinese bilingual signs. Regardless of how you feel about pianos coming in from China, the craftsmen of Chinese descend at the M&H factory make quality pianos under M&H's stewardship.

2. I also talked to the craftsmen, mostly in Mandarin, mostly because I felt I wanted to know more about the people who build those great pianos in addition to reading the brochures and talking to their leaders. The stringer said she has two years' experience stringing pianos, the bridge notcher said he has four years of notching bridges (I found his laser-like focus on the chiseling while on the job most impressive -- he had the air of a true master of his art, almost like a master samurai ceremonially sharpening his sword before a battle as portrayed in Hollywood movies -- it's that dramatic.) The damper installer said he was trained for three or four months before being put on the job. The person doing action assembly said she can assemble one and one half "sets" of piano action a day. I have no idea if those levels of training/experience/pacing are typical for other piano manufacturers, but the proof is in the results -- the results are in the M&H pianos that you can play for yourself today, and the results are good!

The "CNC Router" and Automation

You can see the big new machine that is the "Computer and Numerically Controlled (CNC) Router" in some of the pictures posted. It's M&H's new tool to build their pianos. "Hand-craftsmanship" and "automated production" gets debated around here every now and then. But looking at M&H uses the big machine and at the resulting pianos, and hearing Bruce Clark talk about what other tasks they have in mind for the CNC Router going into the future, I am fairly convinced that both hand-craftsmanship and automation have their rightful place in building good pianos, and that moving more and more tasks from hand-crafting to machine automation, when done right, does not necessarily subtract from the quality of the product, no matter how much we want to romanticize the notion of "hand-craftsmanship."

The Wet Sand Casting versus V-Pro Casting Argument

I asked our tour guide Bruce Clark on his opinion on wet sand casting versus V-pro casting. His response was that wet sand casting produces plates with rougher surfaces that would cost more to finish (he said roughly half of the cost in the plates is in finishing it), V-pro produces smoother surfaces that would be less expensive to finish. M&H currently uses wet sand casted plates. He did not think there is noticeable difference in piano sound that would be attributable to wet sand casting versus V-pro. He is of the opinion that when people complaining about V-pro plates giving off "zings," it's because the plates were made too thin -- so the complains directed at V-pro are really complains that should be directed at thin plates.

Humidity Control

Two tidbits related to humidity control that I figure I'd bring in since every once in a while we see posts that fret over humidity control.

1. When asked about humidity control in the factory, Bruce Clark freely admitted that the old building is too leaky for full humidity control. So to minimize the impact of possible humidity swings between stages of production, they keep their wood assemblies in drying chambers until they are needed, and then glue things up quickly and let things set before humidity swing has time to throw the wood's dimensions off. Basically, what they lacked in humidity control, they made up for it by very carefully choreographing the manufacturing steps to a very tight pace to avoid potential humidity related problems.

2. Some one else asked about Dampp-Chaser. Bruce Clark's response was that he would rather see people attempt to control the relative humidity in the home, and only use Dampp-Chaser under extreme circumstances. The reason he offered was that Dampp-Chaser's effect would be too focused at particular areas of the piano and not sufficiently diffused to the rest of the piano.

Soundboard Choices and Soundboard Fitting

See Chris W1's post HERE . Basically, M&H once tested pianos with Engleman, Eastern White, and Sitka spruces as soundboard material. They claim Sitka produced the worst tone to their ears. Engleman and Eastern White were in a tie in that they thought Engleman was a little weak in the trebble while Eastern White was a little weak in the bass, and since they thought their pianos have ample power in the bass from the designs, they went with Eastern White and have been sticking with Eastern White spruce soundboard ever since.

Bruce Clark stressed that they sand the inner rim to fit the soundboard's curvature around the edges, and claimed that that is an integral manufacturing step that contribute to the M&H's sound. This is only possible if the press the inner and outer rims separately, so they firmly believe that that's the right way to press rims. The A and BB's sanding is currently done by hand following a pattern. IIRC, they plan on using the CNC Router to do this for the AA in the future because the CNC Router supposedly can sand to a more complex curvature than is possible by hand.

Action Parts

Renner parts, IIRC, with only two custom parts: the flange, and another part that I do not remember. Those two custom parts mate with the action rails and are specific to M&H. Other Renner action parts are not M&H-specific.

Production

Small volume, less than 300 pianos a year according to charts posted in the hall (next to bcarey's Piano World Piano Forum post). Concentrating on grand pianos and making may be about one upright a week. The bottleneck to not producing more uprights is a craftsman's skill set. I do not remember which skill it was, but they rely on one craftsman to perform that skill, and that one craftsman can either work on a grand or an upright at a time. So until they train more craftsmen with that skill set, they'll have to settle for their production volume right now. They concentrate on grand pianos now because that's more profitable for them.

Looking at the rims stored in the drying chamber, it seems they're hard at work building new AA's.

The M&H CC Concert Grand

IIRC, should be revealed "not too long after the AA," 9'4" long, and "double tension resonator" (two metal spiders under the piano).

New PianoDisc System

See separate post HERE .

Other Thoughts and Tidbits
(And generally rounding up scattered pieces related to the tour.)

Bruce Clark frequently stressed his believe in using only quality material to build quality piano, and in the M&H way of building pianos (see the Soundboard Choice and Soundboard Fitting section, for examples). When talked about piano design and the evolution of the M&H piano, he stressed that M&H has been making continuous improvements based on existing designs. He pointed out that the AA was evolved from the old AA, and the new CC will be an evolution over the old CC. He also pointed at the aliquot as another example of continuous improvement, and one of honing existing features: they have now put a steel plate under the tunable aliquots. Tunable aliquot is an old M&H feature, but they are rarely tuned, not even in the factory, because the aliquots sit on the cast iron plate and people would not want to risk scratching the beautifully finished cast iron plate to tune the aliquots. Now that they put a steel plate between the aliquots and the cast iron plate, people can actually tune them and not worry about scratching the cast iron plate, and M&H might one day make aliquot tuning a standard part of factory preparation.

* Acknowledgements *

The Pianos:

A row of six pianos in this order:

#1. Wood-finished A (with PianoDisc)
#2. Black A
#3. Black BB (my favorite, with "stealth" PianoDisc)
#4. Black AA (the same prototype shown at NAMM, according to Ramirez)
#5. Black BB
#6. Wood-finished BB

The Hall:

It's big. It's on the top floor of factory, with very high ceiling. It's very "life" and very loud with hardwood floor and no window treatment, no wall hanging to absorb sound. The six pianos are all lined up in one row with fairly generous spacing between them (i.e., pianist can sit comfortably at the keyboard). My guess is that the room can easily take three rows of 8 pianos per row with comfortable spacing. You can see it in the sixth picture HERE .

My Subjective Impressions of the Pianos:

First, on Piano #3, the AA.

This is the piano I spent most time with. I started with selections from Rzewski's "The People United" variations (the opening Thema, variation #13, and the closing Thema). The objective was to explore the full pitch and dynamic range of the piano (from lowest A to the highest B-flat, from ppp to fff and sfz), the piano's tune-carrying capability (floating melodic lines in the midst of thick chords) and its sustain/decay characteristics.

The first impression is that the touch seemed to be rather light (later found that all six pianos gave me this same impression, but the AA especially so). Much lighter than the M&H grand pianos I have played just a few months ago (two in Londonderry Piano and Organ in Salem, NH, a few more in Faust-Harrison in New York). Caveat is that the hall was bright and "life," so psycho-acoustically, to some extent, I could have confused the loudness/brightness of the hall for the light touch. To be honest, I was taken rather aback by the brightness and loudness of the piano/room combination for the first minute or two of the test drive.

The piano definitely has a very big dynamic range across the whole keyboard -- no surprise there compared to previous M&H experiences. Even, responsive action -- no surprise there. Good melodic capabilities, can easily punch the melodic lines through thick chords, can "float" a soft melodic line above activities in the bass -- no surprise there. An all around good piano.

The biggest improvement, to my ears, is in the balance. The bass, while still suffer a bit of a power drop-off compared to the rest of the piano to my ears, are better balanced compared to the A's and the BB's I have played in the past, where I thought there were disproportional drop-off in power in the very low bass. The AA ameliorated this drop-off to some extent, so the piano came off better balanced.

The second piece I tried on the AA was Albeniz's "Tango." It's a slow, soft, melodic piece. Pitch-wise, it is limited to roughly the four octaves in the middle of the keyboard and it's confined in the pp to mf dynamic range, mostly in p and mp. The objective was to explore the nuance of the piano in that range. (After the Rzewski piece, I decided to avoid loud/busy pieces because I figured the hall would be too bright for them anyway.)

I used to have trouble with M&H's sustain pedal before (thought it too stiff and difficult to control half-pedaling, perhaps due to individual habit). Not with this AA. The technician who did the preparation has perhaps as much influence on this as the inherent quality of the instrument, but this piano reacted very intuitively to me, as far as pedaling is concerned, both sustain and una corda. Various levels and combinations of sustain and una corda pedaling just "work as expected" to produce the sound I was hoping to produce. The hall was bright and I used the una corda more frequent and more aggressively than I usually do. Considering that's my 7th or 8th minute on the AA, that level of predictability and intuitiveness afforded by the instrument was very impressive.

Next, upon Kenny's request, I played a seven measure short piece, the same piece on all six pianos serially, from #1 to #6. (PDF music sheet HERE if you want to know what was played.)

Piano #1 "A" sounded "big" and bright.
Piano #2 "A" sounded not as big and less bright.
Piano #3 "BB" sounded "best" to my ears, probably because it's the mellowest of the lot in the very bright hall. This piano also has a very cool player PianoDisc player system installed (described HERE ).
Piano #4 "AA" described in great detail above.
Piano #5 "BB" sounded good too, but did not register any deep impression.
Piano #6 "BB" is the brightest sounding among the BB's (also seemingly had the lightest touch among the BB's).

Overall impression is that:

1. As mentioned before, the new M&H seem to have lighter touch than the older ones from last year.

2. The pianos, even among those of the same models, still sound different from one to another. How much is due to preparation/voicing, how much is inherent, I cannot tell. Different enough that, IMHO, it's still worth "test driving" the actual pianos before you buy.

3. The pianos have very long sustain -- to a point where I felt the notes just took too long to decay, it's like the notes just won't die as long as you keep the key pressed. (Personal preference: I thought a piano's note is supposed to die down with natural-sounding decay, and that too long a sustain is not necessarily a good thing. I thought the M&H's high-trebble sustain crossed into the "too long" territory. Again, this is personal taste and nothing against M&H. )

4. I could transfer what I "learnt" on the AA, in terms of what to change in my touch and pedaling to get certain sound, to the other pianos pretty effectively to get the sort of sound and control I wanted from those other pianos. Again, I do not know how much of it is due to inherent build/design consistency and how much due to piano preparations, but I thought that kind of consistency and predictability/transference across a product line is pretty impressive.

Oh, and Cecil Ramirez played a very nice Gershwin selection, lounge music style, on the AA. No offense to other members who also played marvelously, but of all the performances I heard that afternoon, I liked Ramirez's Gershwin selection the most. It was beautifully heart-felt. He really knows his instrument! (And, no offense to Ramirez, that's the best performance I've heard coming from a "piano salesman." )

* Acknowledgements *

Great post, Axtremus! Lots of excellent info.

Jeanne W

Axtremus... Enjoyed your informative review... Thanks.

Fantastic write-up, Axtremus... It ought to get published!

Thanks for reviving the memories. What a great day it was!!! Ya!?

Thanks again, Frank, Cecil, Bruce and M&H.

Wow, it's like we are there again! Thanks for the great description!

It was a great day and we really must do more of this sort of thing. PW has brought together the nicest bunch of people!

Thanks for the great write-up, Axtremus. Very comprehensive!

You definitley get an A+ for your report, Ax.

HELP
How do I access the report (M&H Tour?) by Axtremus?

Jeremy Gloo

It's on the first page of this thread (post #23 and post #24, near the end of the first page). Or just CLICK HERE .

A441/Jeremy, I really enjoyed your blue/jazzy performance at the M&H factory as well! You and Frank's Rocking performance provided the only non-Classical music from PW members, IIRC. Both tested the pianos in different ways and were entirely enjoyable. [EDIT: Just remembered Jeanne W's original composition that's not entirely classical, but it certainly sounded more classical than A441/Jeremy's and Frank's. ]

Thanks every one for your kind words. It was great meeting other forum members; you're such a wonderful bunch!

I look forward to seeing most (if not all) of you, as well as those who did not make it to the M&H factory tour, at the New England Piano World Piano Party that BeeLady will be hosting in MA on June 26. ( CLICK HERE for party details .)

Ax,

Great stuff. I may have learned more about M&H pianos from your write-up than I would have had I played them myself. Well done & Thanks!

JP

Jeremy, will you be coming up for the party?

Bring the Cape Cod gang if you like! The more the merrier!

That goes,too, for anyone else! PM me if you need info and directions.

Axtremus,

Many thanks, I always enjoy your posts.

Sincerely,
Steve

I found this interesting.

In a few years, I may want to get a piano with a more "American" sound, and I'm not very excited about buying Steinway, given all the complaints I read about them.

Mason & Hamlin is a brand I want to check into eventually.

By the way, Arthur Rubinstein's biography says he got into it with the Steinway people, and that he RAVED about Mason & Hamlin.