Originally Posted by
SJX426
Two good relevant comments above @
Repack Rider and @
Marcus_Ti. Piano's require regular TLC including tuning every 6 months. Even then, they may need to be "regulated" after 20 years or so. Then they need to be broken in to return to their former glory. Humidity control is the most important variable to maintaining the value through sound. The wood is simply furniture. Nice wood does not a good piano make.
My wife has a 6ft Yamaha C-3 conservatory grand from 1978 that sounds great after all these years. Like bikes, they are all a bit different, even within a model run. its been tuned every 6 months from the first day. Tuning took very little time because it held so well between tunings, so the variation of tuning was small. It is important to keep the tension of all those strings close to audible spec. to ensure the rest of the supporting hardware keeps its "set".
Prior to the C-3 she had a cheep spinet, it worked for a year or so then became a POS, impossible to keep in tune for more than a couple of days. Poor maintenance was the biggest factor. Quality of design and parts was the next.
It used to be part of the allure of keyboard instruments.
Back in the Good Old Days only the lord/ladies who weren't covered in sh*t could ever dream of affording a keyboard instrument, which were the successors to the lute and theorbo in the basso continuo department. And if you were a bored noble one way you passed your hours while the peasants broke their backs for you was music....and one of the supreme problems with keyboards was how to tune them in such a way that they sounded good given the specific piece. You literally were retuning your keyboard for every piece....as with any tuning system you end up with some really good harmonies and some really crunchy ones...frequently the best you could hope for was tonic and dominant key centers to be in tune and the rest was a crapshoot....IOW, you only had 2 good keys (plus their major and minor) that sounded pretty good out of 24....then some idiot came along and promoted Equal Temperament (around the time that Louis and Marie were relieved of their heads), and harmony and people's ears have been ruined ever since-because ET makes everything a little or a lot out of tune to salvage all 12 keys.
Fun fact...equal temperament has been around for a few centuries...but was not common practice used by professionals even into the 20th century. Sure people *said* they used it, but they didn't actually do so...the best concert hall piano techs in the world were using 1/4 mean-tone up until around the advent of the oscilloscope.