Agraffes in uprights / Frank

[RicB]

Hi Frank

Nice posting and I thank you for it.  I personally like it when folks 
provide a bit of straightforward reasoning to explain their perspectives 
on matters.  Their seems to be a point of contention relative to the 
<<performance>> of agraffes visa vi pressure bar solutions in uprights 
in the discussion so far.  I'm not sure what each party actually means 
by <<performance>> but certainly in many if not the greatest majority of 
pianos I have to either restring or change a single string on the 
agraffe presents the easiest to deal with solution by and large. I run 
into a lot of pressure bar instruments where you have to really struggle 
to get a broken string through the termination and counterbearing, and 
then get the bend into the darned pinhole.  Never run into this with 
agraffed uprights.   And, they do have the nice habit of making sure the 
strings are correctly aligned.... assuming the agraffes themselves are 
correctly placed. Granted this is not usually a concern in anycase... 
but when it is, its always in a non agraffe instrument.

 That said... I have yet to hear any real reasoning as to the 
differences between the two solutions concerning acoustic related 
performance issues, and would sorely like to hear some.  Strikes me that 
whatever differences there may be... there are certainly many 
instruments with agraffes that sound and bear up over time quite as 
nicely as any without. I would also be very interested in hearing more 
on the different configurations of the <<six variables>> you mentioned 
in your post.. and exactly what those six variables consisted of.

Cheers
RicB