Piano Impossible to Tune?

[JSmith]

A zombie topic risen from the grave! My favorite kind.

... t'was quite the necro, only 8 years.

You can tune a piano.
But you can't tune-a-fish.

Piano Tuna...


JSmith

 

[Multicore]

... t'was quite the necro, only 8 years.

about as far as you can possibly go on ASR. good thing the youtoob was still up!

 

[Multicore]

The fact that Yamaha provides a mechanism for resetting the keyboard suggests to me that your old man is not imagining things.

I thought the thing with the headphones was interesting too. If you played for decades with an acoustic piano and then with speakers and then only in old age try playing with phones plugged into a Clavinova, I can easily imagine the effect being displeasing. I, for one, usually struggle to describe my perception of sound in words and I often can't relate when others try. Perhaps dad chose the best words he could find. For example, with a piano that's not well tuned, as a novice I might not identify the problem and say "it doesn't sound right". A well experienced player who's often played pianos that were out of tune in their unique way might well say that it sounds out of tune when confronted with a novel sound that's not at first pleasing.

idk and i'm just guessing but I'm inclined to take @Leporello 's dad seriously if not always literally.

 

[Natchie]

Just to throw a monkey wrench in here, what about a traditional pipe organ inside a church...does it ever go out of tune or is it pitch perfect?

 

[Titurel]

If anything, pipe organs tend to go out of tune more easily than pianos. They do not, however, need stretched tuning.

 

[DonH56]

Just to throw a monkey wrench in here, what about a traditional pipe organ inside a church...does it ever go out of tune or is it pitch perfect?

Pipe resonance is a function of air density and sound transmission, which depends upon temperature and humidity among other things, so their pitch tends to vary a bit pretty much all the time. I was going to say "constantly vary"...

 

[gwing]

"Madamina, il catalogo e questo..."

The fact that Yamaha provides a mechanism for resetting the keyboard suggests to me that your old man is not imagining things.

A sort of ‘factory reset’ function is common on most electronics where users can get into a mess by adjusting presets and preferences. Never say never but a clavinova getting out of tune and being fixed by reset seems less than likely to me so likely imagination is at work here. Just possibly the clavinova allows different tunings to be selected and it was a case of user fiddling with controls though and a reset bringing things back to normal.

 

[Titurel]

A sort of ‘factory reset’ function is common on most electronics where users can get into a mess by adjusting presets and preferences. Never say never but a clavinova getting out of tune and being fixed by reset seems less than likely to me so likely imagination is at work here. Just possibly the clavinova allows different tunings to be selected and it was a case of user fiddling with controls though and a reset bringing things back to normal.

Factory resets also exist so that companies (even the biggies) can graciously allow the unsuspecting public to beta test their products. In fairness to Yamaha et al., exhaustive testing of microprocessor based products became all but impossible sometime in the early '80s. "It's not a bug. It's a feature."