1.  Sound Quality and Power

 

Until the beginning of the 20th century there was a culture of innovation and experiment in piano design which was combined with collaboration with lead artists to seek better performance from both the piano and the artist. This led to fierce competition.  Control of piano manufacture in the larger companies thus transferred to financiers with the inevitable result that there was stagnation in improvement of the science except in the adoption of savings in manufacture and materials.

 

From these pressures a new type of piano appeared, the mass produced "cheap but adequate" instrument. By the 1960's this dominated the market except where refinements needed by professionals and top venues demanded better pianos. 

 

By the end of the twentieth century the mass market was firmly in the hands of builders in the Far East and the lead European and American piano makers had come under great strain to remain profitable. Some opted to enter the cheap end of the market by manufacturing or buying and re-naming pianos from the Far East. Some went out of business.  Others battened down the hatches by reducing development and eliminating the staff associated with it.  The latter continued to build designs which had barely changed for a century or more.  Virtually all of these incorporated serious deficiencies, but the makers dared not change for fear of destroying the perceived good features of their piano because they no longer understood which features contributed to its performance.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, a pioneer piano designer, Wayne Stuart, saw an opening.  Over a decade he studied and trained and then with backing from an Australian sponsor of great foresight (Albert Industries), built what is effectively the first truly innovative piano for over 100 years...if one puts aside the highly innovative barless Broadwood which has not had wide acceptance.  Stuart sought and obtained longer sustain, more power, and greater tuning stability.  In professional circles, this piano has received enthusiastic acclaim and the accolade of Royal interest.

 

Stuart Pianos are built in small numbers using the very best materials available for the purpose housed in a case which is so finely crafted that it is itself a unique work of art.

 

The Stuart sound board is King William Pine 1000 years old. This takes to new heights the attributes of timber needed for best sound, namely low density and high stiffness. 

 

The case veneer is for some instruments 2000 year old Huon Pine because this is very hard and serves to provide a perfect reflective surface for the resonance box even better than hard maple which the best other builders use. 

 

The Stuart  piano has a form of bridge agraffe which allows the string to pass in a straight line from tuning pin to hitch pin.  This preserves its vertical plane of vibration and thus imparts a better purity and clarity of sound. 

 

The frame is designed with the benefit of finite element stress analysis to optimise and minimise the use of material.  Pianos have been flown from Australia to the UK with reloading in Hong Kong, yet arrived in condition to go straight onto the concert stage without re-tuning. Our experience is that tuning once for every three to four times that a traditional piano (without duplex scaling) is tuned will retain the same standard of tuning on Stuart pianos. Compared with a duplex scaled piano the ratio is even more favourable.

 

Stuart pianos have no agraffes at the tuning pin end of the speaking length.  The capodastra bar extends over the full 97 key register.  The rigidity and therefore reflectivity of sound wave this imparts to the speaking length of the string no doubt contributes greatly to the long sustain of the piano.

 

Steingraeber take this a concept further with a capodastra bar in the top two registers that is joined to the plate between each trichord. The strings pass through holes in the bar.  It is difficult to imagine a more rigid and firm string termination could be devised. The power of these upper registers of Steingraeber demonstrates the validity of  this principle. In the lower registers they retain conventional agraffes.

Because of the finish and the fact that Stuart pianos are built in small numbers in a high labour cost country, the price is high, though they comprise superb value for money and cost less that the inflated prices quoted, but rarely charged, by other self designated top builders. Stuart pianos are increasingly being demanded by top artists for public performance.

 

In the early years of the new millennium, we at Hurstwood Farm Pianos found ourselves with an exceptionally fine Bösendorfer Imperial concert grand piano which had been dropped and virtually destroyed by transporters.  We salvaged the intact frame, re-built the case and action, and began experiments to take piano design into the next century.

 

Our first work was however not on the piano, but was centred on developing new computer techniques to analyse and then quantify leading attributes of piano sound. Armed with this scientific analytical tool we could assess the effect of small changes which would not be consistently evident to the human ear whose response changes with the physical state of the listener.  This technology is still in its infancy, but we can now make quantitive comparison of previously indeterminable features of piano sound  such as clarity, dynamic range, harmonic content, sustain, immediacy, power etc. 

 

It has long been known that the piano as a machine has incredibly low efficiency of conversion of finger energy to sound energy; it is about the same as the best of steam locomotives,  namely 4%.   We sought to improve this. 

The losses occur in many features of construction, including :

 

1.Contact between hammer and string,

2.Within the string and its end fixings

3.Transfer of energy to the bridge and sound board. 

4. Dissipation of energy by poor containment of the soundboard.

5. Internally in the mass and extent of wood, metal and felt components of the piano.

 

We have only scratched the surface of the problems, but already have doubled the energy conversion efficiency of pianos to around 8% .  We expect that within a decade we and others will evolve a piano of 15 to 20% conversion efficiency.  Such instruments have many advantages including longer sustain, more power better clarity and more available sound power to manipulate into ideal sound quality.

 

A major feature is that because the artist can play with less effort to obtain his required sound, he can play with greater accuracy and security.  We have been amused by the way all professionals who play these "Phoenix" pianos comment that the action is superb and better than anything they have encountered elsewhere.  In practice the action in Phoenix pianos is completely conventional, but it is the response of the whole system which is giving this impression.

 

The sound board of pianos is the beating heart of the system.  On traditional pianos it must perform two tasks

 

A)    To receive and convert vibration energy from the strings to sound waves in the air.

B)     To withstand a down bearing load from the strings of over a half tonne which is developed by the change of angle of the strings as they pass over the crown of the bridge. That change of angle is the means by which the strings are retained in firm contact with the bridge when they are struck from beneath.  

 

A sound board is thus called upon to meet two conflicting duties.  With time the board will relapse under load. When this happens the piano will lose power and sound quality.  The thinner the board the sooner it will collapse, but after 20 to 40 years, few top quality pianos still have adequate down bearing.  Down bearing can be restored but this is beyond the ability or indeed the intent of most piano renovators. On the other hand heavy thick material sections and belly bars needed for strength serves to inhibit free vibration of the sound board.  Tests by Morton in 1916 demonstrated that the notorious “weak zones” of pianos (poor sustain in certain notes around the 5th and 6th octaves) were the consequence of excess down bearing on the bass bridge which was constraining the sound board response. Few, if any,  traditional pianos are completely free of this deficiency.

 

Phoenix pianos now operate with almost no down bearing.  This has enabled sound board proportions to be chosen to optimise acoustic performance independently of strength requirements.  The current soundboards are as little a 4mm thick compared with 8mm on the average traditional piano.  Since the Phoenix boards are almost un stressed they should have indefinite life in top condition.

 

With greater power and dynamic range we found that additional aid was needed to play these new generation pianos very quietly.  We therefore introduced a novel pedal device by which the una corda pedal if depressed further than normal will reduce the hammer blow by up to 50%.  Alternatively a simple lever accords the pianist pre-set choice of touch depth and thus a kind of "volume control".

 

New Phoenix pianos are now built under licence by Steingraeber in Bayreuth. Three models are currently offered and a fourth will be added later ( 272,  205 and 168 length). 

Conversion of fine quality other makes to the Phoenix system can also be made.  Bösendorfer in particular  leads to a piano with exceptionally fine performance. 

 

The case finish  and thus the cost of  Phoenix pianos is conventional and within the range of other traditional tier one instruments.  However special finishes of ultimate craftsmanship can be made to special order.  We keep for demonstration (but not for sale) a Steingraeber Phoenix concert grand finished in unique unstained Santos Rosewood. There is sufficient veneer wood available to build just one more piano in this finish. That is currently being done. 

 

Traditional piano builders now stand at a watershed.  They must either invest in

resources to develop new technology or suffer the fate of the builders of steam locomotives which could not compete with new diesel and electric locomotive technology.  We watch with concern for the future of those companies who believe they can swim against the tide and rely on preserving their position by commercial gimmick backed by public denigration of those seeking improvement through innovation.

 

For some it is already too late.  They have lost their dedicated production facility or have been bought by financiers perhaps for asset stripping.

 

With the liquidation of WMC along with some dozen famous name pianos, no major piano builder now exists in the UK where once we were World leaders. 

 

Bösendorfer, once a treasure of Austrian history and culture, was sold to American financiers Cerberus in December 2006. 

Brodmann, another Austrian builder of historical reputation, now imports almost exclusively from China.

Bechstein suffered financial collapse and then rescue by the German Government about a decade ago before re-sale and merger.

Even action spare parts carrying famous names are now said to be being sourced in China.

 

Grand actions have changed little since the mid nineteenth century and are based on inspired work by the French entrepreneur and piano genius Erard.  They are astonishly robust and versatile so that in the hands of a skilled technician can provide almost any feel or response an artist may demand.  Their weakness is that these actions all require great skill to regulate them to perfection.  These days few instruments are set and maintained in ideal condition because that takes great time and care which most modern technicians seem unwilling or unable to apply.  We understand from artists that even in top UK venues many of the recital pianos are seriously badly maintained. 

 

An important feature of these actions is the timing and the manner in which the escapement functions by the jack disengaging from the roller.  If there is high friction, high loading or uneven setting, the artist will sense a lack of control.

 

With this in mind some 5 years ago an Austrian technician produced an action in which the "roller" actually rotates in almost frictionless bearings on the hammer shank.  This was not a novel concept, but is one which had never been applied commercially. The objective is to reduce the weighting of secondary touch and facilitate restoring the jack under the roller so the escapement is reset and the note can be replayed.  The action was launched under the name Knuckle Action. 

 

The feel of this action is silky smooth and in many ways superb.  However it may have a problem of high speed repetition. A conventional roller jack pair (with fixed roller) can function reasonably well when the jack is not completely fully home  under the roller.  This is because the corner of the jack digs into the roller and grips it.  Indeed the sharpness of the corner on the jack is one of the features which piano designers use to impose their own feel on an action. The sharper the corner the better the repetition but the more "graunchy" the action feels.  

 

With the knuckle action, the jack disengages whenever the jack corner is even slightly away from its rest position because the roller can and does rotate.  If the jack has not had time to return to a full rest position or if it bounces slightly, as in fast repetition, the note may mis-fire.

 

Recent experiments in Hurstwood Farm Piano Studios with strategically placed tiny samarium magnets to assist the jack to return quickly and fully under the roller have achieved great improvement in the performance of knuckle actions, but this idea is not available in commercial production and we have no immediate intention of introducing it except for special builds.

 

At Hurstwood Farm we keep a demonstration concert grand Steingraeber piano available in which the traditional action can be exchanged with a knuckle action. Nearly all visitors at first express an opinion strongly in favour of the knuckle action but when asked to play a piece demanding fast repetition most change their opinion.

 

For the present we believe that traditional grand actions will remain the preferred option and that improvements in the acoustic response of the piano will enable them to operate under easier loading condition which will convey to the artist a better interface with his instrument.

3.  Upright Actions

 

Full size upright pianos are usually capable of producing better sound than baby grands because of their longer strings and larger sound boards.  They however have one commanding disadvantage. A note played on a conventional upright cannot be reliably repeated until the key has returned almost completely to its rest position, because the jack cannot return under the butt to reset the escapement mechanism.  One can mask this to a small extent by fine regulation of the checks, but the fundamental shortcoming cannot be circumvented entirely.

 

In consequence an upright piano is harder to control in quiet playing.  Trilling in a controlled way is difficult.

 

Some two years ago saw the commercial introduction of the DFM action, a German invention now in production by Renner under licence.  This action uses an ingenious placing of magnets to restore the jack under the butt when the key has lifted as little as 1 to 2 mm.  The same device eliminates lost motion when the half blow (soft) pedal is used.

 

The DFM action has transformed the performance of upright pianos. One can interpret to as fine degree as on a grand.  Indeed it is difficult to sense whether one is playing a grand or an upright piano.  Trilling is if anything even easier than on a grand.

 

At the same time Steingraeber  (so often in the lead with new technology !)  introduced another optional new action called the "Repetition Action" for their uprights which achieves similar performance by mechanical means.  This action is perhaps easier for the technician to handle but introduces a tiny amount of extra friction into the system which the most sensitive of artists may just detect. In special circumstances of very quiet, slow playing a faint double strike is sometimes  a risk. Despite these minor disadvantages, we thoroughly endorse this action as a big advance.

 

In the past few months Steingraeber (again!) have patented a new form of the magnetic upright action which they designate DFS.  This takes account of legislation shortly to be introduced under EC regulation which may make sale of the DFM action as it now is conceived illegal because of its small heavy metal content !

 

Some dealers now find traditional upright action pianos almost unsaleable if they are displayed alongside pianos fitted with DFM or Repetition Action.  At Hurstwood farm we have a policy of only offering these new actions on our uprights unless the customer places a special order.  The new actions cost about 8% more.

 

As with state of the art improvements in grand piano acoustics, those Makers who do not accept and apply modern technology will bring forward the day when their business is displaced by the new generation of technically dynamic piano builders. It is no accident that so many famous name piano builders are already not profitable and subject to frequent ownership change, while others have already been merged or ceased trading except in name.

 

Those European Makers that meet the challenge by fostering new improved technology and by concentrating on supply of pianos of superior performance and quality have an assured future....