Did anyone catch the CBS Amazing Race episode featuring the efforts of the contestants to correct one detuned string on a grand piano in Poland.

I felt sorry for the poor contestants, but to a professional tuner it was hilarious ... and painful!

I only caught about 30 seconds of this show, and my jaw dropped when I realized they were asking the teams to tune a string on a grand! I wonder whose idea that was. Didn't see the results...

The results were very instructive. Only one string of the middle "C" triad was detuned slightly, and the contestants were asked to restore the note so that a player standing by would pass it as acceptable.

The teams that I saw spent over an hour each trying in vain to get an acceptable unison and one team gave up after two hours! Two teams (that they showed) broke strings. From what I could gather, two other teams detuned surrounding strings trying to isolate the problem.

I don't watch this show much, but I've never seen them assign a task before that is really in the professional realm. Hopefully, they won't have them doing brain surgury next.

Too bad they didn't make 'em regulate a blocking hammer.

I saw this and I have to disagree with smallfish, who says one string on middle C was detuned slightly.

It was detuned a lot -- their first task was to play the entire keyboard a note at a time to find the bad key. When they hit that key, it was a "clinker." WAY off. As soon as they hit that key, they knew what they had to do.

I am not sure that each team had middle C -- I know ONE of them did have that.

When they supposedly "fixed" the bad key, a pianist sat down and played a very decent version of a Chopin Polanaise [sp?]. The whole "schtick" was very classy and fun.

The salon, the attire of the pianist, the sound of the Chopin -- it was GREAT.

The other posters are right -- a couple of the teams had extraordinary trouble. One couple persevered. The audience thought they were "dead ducks," but then, amazingly, they twisted their tool and had it "right on." As the other poster said, it took them about an hour -- but somehow they did finally get it right.