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As far as I'm concerned, laminate vs. solid spruce soundboard is not the problem so much as this is the first I've heard about Hailun's so-called laminate sound board.

Hailun's 178 and smaller models having a plywood or laminate soundboard is not mentioned, as far as I can see, in Hailun's brochure literature. Wendl and Lung does mention, "Mutured spruce wood embedded in a precisely glued back frame construction . . ." and "Specifically climate-resistant construction with excellent dimensional stability and outstanding sound." All though what they actually mean, if they are even talking about a laminated soundboard, is not as clear cut as Yamaha Cable Nelson's simple, "laminated soundboard."

The fact is, no one really knows if Hailun laminates its soundboards or not. I'm only going by what Gary and Sam have said.


Mike

Mike.
What you are writing is akin to slander and misinformation of the worst type. The soundboards are not plywood in any manner of the word.
What has been carefully described is not even similar to plywood and you know it.

If you will take the time to read many of Dell Fandrich's posts about the advantages of a laminate soundboard you can not help but see that the Hailun method of putting a thin laminate spruce cover upon a solid spruce soundboard is a very good soundboard with very much improved life and the still very good sound of a spruce soundboard.

And if the problem is that Hailun has not personally disclosed this to you until recently sounds like you are some self appointed and very important authority which the piano world must bow before.

The proof of any design is in the quality of tone which comes out of the piano. The second proof is the quality of research and testing which it's design is built upon. Your attacks upon this seem not based upon anything but your desire to injure Hailun or your prejudice against new soundboard designs.

What you seem to want is a $12,000 grand piano with a genuine spruce soundboard of the Highest quality bought from the best sources and like unto a $50,000 piano. How do you propose that someone build a better piano to sell for $12,000?
Of course they must come and consult with the great authority Mike Carr before putting it into production.

Mike. Even a brief reading of some of your posts disclose that you are some unusual piano expert.
You claim to be retired and own a $50,000 Yamaha S4,.
Yet you claim to spend time constantly keeping up with prices at many stores, on Craigs List, and with regard to many brands of pianos. You claim to play and judge pianos on a continuous basis. And write as an expert on pianos of new and used, of all price ranges, and all brands.
Then you are quick to offer "expert" advice to steer people to Yamaha pianos.
You know about pricing on any piano even in Australia as you offer pricing advice to shoppers there.
And of course you are an expert on piano warranties and "Yamaha" has the best warranty of all. Kawai next best. and you are quick to criticize Hailun and everything about it. You criticize Hailun for having a one year warranty on the bench yet no other brand has any warranty on the bench.
And you are quick to criticize my spelling mistakes.
If I take the time to read some more of your self righteous and misleading posts what else will I find.

Mike, you have attacked my integrity and the integrity of Hailun. However we have the highest integrity.

Now if you have any integrity you will admit your mistakes and apologize for this "plywood" slander and Hailun attack and disclose fully about yourself as you ask of others.

If you try to avoid the truth and increase the misinformation, then you have no integrity. So which will it be?

Gary,

Are we having a "moment" here?



The Great Authority Mike Carr (you can just call me the "Great One" for short. No bowing, please)

Mike,

What is your background and experience as it relates to pianos?

I hope I'm not putting words in Mike's mouth, but the issue is not the soundboard, but the subtle obfuscation of the soundboard design.

Samick makes no secret of its surface tension soundboard, and IIRC makes a point of the lifetime warranty on that soundboard.

As Del has pointed out before, there is no real sound issue with the laminate board. So why hide it?

Certain posters here attack Steinway for not being innovative, and then hide the innovations of their own products?

Why is innovation in pianos something to conceal?

You have to admire the guts of Kawai to go with the ABS action parts. They gave their competitors plenty of ammunition to bash them, but weren't afraid to try something new.

It is really sad that so many words need to be spend on commments from people who either cannot read, intentionally misinterpret what is written or at least do not want to make an effort to read what is published.

Spruce the Hailun specsheet says:

Hailun 178 specifications

schwammerl.

Since my name has been dropped several times on this thread, perhaps I can be permitted a few comments…

I began to recognize the value of laminated soundboards back in the late 1970s. My studies into what were then the mysteries of piano design led me to believe that there were advantages to laminated wood technologies that, if properly developed, could make laminated soundboards at least equal to, if not superior to, the so-called “solid spruce” soundboards commonly in use. Added to this was the reality that humanity was using up the kinds of forests that were the sources of our best tonewoods at rates much faster than they were being replaced.

With all of this in mind I began advocating the use of highly designed and engineered laminated soundboards back around 1980. And I started designing them into new pianos in the mid 1980s. All the while I was being told I was, in a word, whacko.

It has long been the practice of many piano dealers and manufacturers to malign the materials and design features of competitor’s products. Many, if not most, dealers and manufacturers have at one time or another criticized the laminated soundboards as a class—and, yes, the word “plywood” has frequency been bandied about—while the virtues of solid spruce soundboards has been praised no matter how badly designed and/or fabricated they might have been. But only, of course, when those plywood soundboards were found in a competitor’s products.

I suggested, those many years back, that the industry was talking itself into a coming marketing nightmare if it kept doing what it was doing. There were few receptive ears back then but that marketing nightmare has arrived and we are now going to reap what we have sown.

My only suggestion now is to acknowledge our mistakes of the past and move on. I can appreciate how manufacturers and dealers might want to obscure the fact that the soundboards in the pianos they are now promoting are built around laminated soundboards but I think this is a mistake. Sooner or later the astute customer is going to discover that the piano he/she is considering—or has already purchased—contains one of those dreaded laminated soundboards and is going to wonder about it.

None of this would be a controversial issue if piano manufacturers and piano dealers had not made it a controversial issue. My position in all this has not changed; laminated soundboards are going to play an increasingly important role in piano manufacturing and technology. That the transition is now going to be some difficult is a problem of our own making. There are going to be those who delight in tossing our own words back in our collective faces. We may as well acknowledge that reality and move on.

ddf

schwammerl, the specification says nothing about a laminated board. Upthread Gary at Encore wrote:
7) the Hailun soundboard material is a solid spruce core which gives the very good tone, and then there are carefully designed laminations on the top and bottom to create greater life, stability, and to prevent cracking and loss of crown.

Now, he's gotten facts about Hailun wrong in the past, and this might be another case of that.

The question is why is this so hush-hush. Is the soundboard laminated or not? And does it really matter one way or the other?

Great post. That should be on the bulletin board of every piano dealer in the country.

I thought this was the most interesting line in your post and I think I agree. Although I can understand a maker's desire not to "advertise" its soundboards are laminated, parts are from China,etc.(because of some of the public's perception), I think a greater problem can occur when they do find out and it seems almost like the maker was trying to "hide" this information. Then some the public starts wondering why. In a way it's a lose-lose situation for the manufacturer.

I got my facts from the head engineer at Hailun, Frank Emerson. Frank is very proud of 100% spruce soundboard which is made by a thin laminates over a solid core. Frank is very pleased by the wonderful tones which this soundboard creates and the long life that it will have.

Sam also explained the 1/12th details.

So in fact Mike Carr is the one without integrity or truth and is showing no remorse but is trying to smile his bad behavior off.

Thank You Del for your expertise and contributions.

And he should be proud. So why conceal it? Like pianoloverus, I think this will backfire on them. Why take a positive and make it a negative?

Del said it better than me, time to for me to shut up.

Here's a photo that may put this to bed. Nice solid core. Thin Spruce Veneer. Looks good, makes sense, works well. Nothing hidden.


Generally speaking, plywood refers to multiple laminates (or veneers) glued to each other to provide strength. Solid wood is frequently veneered to protect the properties of the core wood (or to improve outer appearance). This type of laminated soundboard qualifies as the latter.

In practice, the term plywood is often mistakenly applied to any kind of laminate.

Everybody have a nice day

Hailun is obviously being misleading about their soundboards.
Although the laminated type can possibly be good, typically they are not. People should play it safe and get the solid soundboard because the instruments in a store may not give a good indication of their sound at home. After voicing the way the customer wants, the laminated might be sub par.

Encore,

You're right. It's hard not to smile, sometimes.

What Gary Schenk was referring to was your inaccurate statement about Hailun's warranty policy.

In fact, since Hailun has not made clear on their website exactly how their soundboards in the smaller grands are constructed, I'm wondering if you might have misunderstood the whole thing? No one really knows until Hailun makes an official statement, clearing up this mess.


Mike

The technical definition of plywood is “a composite board of veneers glued together with the grain directions of adjacent layers mutually perpendicular.” The thickness of the various layers is not an issue. Nor is the number of layers although to keep the composite board stable there is usually an odd number of layers.

The early composite boards that were used to replace the so-called “solid wood” panels were, indeed, plywood. Little was done to adapt the technology to the requirements of a piano soundboard. They were cheap and they could be guaranteed for 50 years. That was all that mattered. But that was then and this is now.

I can’t imagine any pianomaker today using anything like those early plywood soundboards. The “composite boards of veneers” used to make piano soundboard panels today are now properly called “laminated panels.” They are designed specifically to be piano soundboards. None that I am aware of orient the layers in a “mutually perpendicular” direction.

Starting in about the mid 1980s multi-layered panes began to be engineered—designed—to be piano soundboards. Nowadays about the only folks who call these panels “plywood” are competitive dealers who are deliberately trying to belittle a competitor’s product. And sooner or later those words will come back to haunt.

ddf

In the 1960s these comments clearly did have some validity.

In the 1970s little had changed except that the piano buying public was becoming increasingly aware of the limitations of those early plywood soundboards. Folks were becoming wary of them and comments like these were commonplace.

In the 1980s the early crude attempts at making laminated soundboards were being replaced by laminated panels that were being designed specifically to be piano soundboards. Their performance was improving and comments like these were being challenged by the reality of those better performing pianos.

In the 1990s purpose-designed laminated soundboard panels were coming into their own as piano makers began to figure out how to work with them. The performance of pianos using laminated soundboard panels continued to improve and comments like these were rapidly losing their validity.

In the 2000s laminated soundboard panels were continually refined and the remaining tone performance gap between laminated soundboard panels and solid spruce panels began to close. Comments like these had lost their meaning and their power to terrorize the hapless consumer and the industry began to they no longer had any place in the marketing dialog.

In 2010 comments like these are demonstrably out of date. Laminated soundboard technology is good enough today that many, if not most, pianists cannot tell the difference between the two.

There is no reason to fear that an instrument in a store cannot be voiced in the home simply because it might have a laminated soundboard panel. A comment like, “After voicing the way the customer wants, the laminated might be sub par” now has no validity at all. Even if I could understand what it means.

ddf

No opinion on the merits of the different boards, but my memory (could be faulty) is that Hailun used to claim solid white spruce for the 161 and the 178.

The current Hailun website states optimum grae A European spruce for the 161. The info sheet for the 198 states tapered Bavarian spruce (no mention of solid). The 218 mentions "solid" spruce as well as German and Bavarian. Interestingly enough, clicking the link to the 178 gets me a 404"page not found" error screen. All in all, a consumer's ultra-low-cal dinner from a marketing man's buffet.

The current W&L website makes the modest claim of "matured spruce wood" for both the 161 and 178. They share a PDF spec sheet. W&L does not offer Emerson's 198, so nothing on that. The description of the 218 is "Top quality soundboard made by Strunz of Bavaria" and the PDF adds "double assymetric crown". as an innovation. There is no mention of'solid' but one would assume (I presume).

I tried to bring up the old distributor's Hailun Aspire website, but I guess Hailun finally managed to get it down. This website PDF is where I believe the 161 and 178 boards were in past years described as solid whie spruce (but again, I could be wrong).

Since I could no longer aspire to Hailun Aspire, I brought up the old Steigerman Music description of the Steigerman Premium 161 and 178. Those of you who have followed Hailun for a while will recall that Steigerman Premiums were in fact Hailuns and that Steigerman had a dealer network in place in the US before Hailun had one under its own name.

Steigereman, which calso claimed Frank Emerson as its chief designer, described both the 161 and the 178 as having "a tapered, solid spruce soundboard, precision-made using state-of-the-art Asian technology". That's a descritption that doesn't lend itself to different interpretations and that description kind of reflects my memory of the description on the old Hailun Aspire website.

I'd like to ask Sam, who represents Hailun and who (I believe) formerly represented Steigerman Premium, if the specs on the 161 and 178 soundboards have changed from solid to laminated, or if they were always laminated and my meory has failed me.

For those of you who don't give a hoot about this, I'm not obsessing either. I'm happy to listen to what the pianos have to say....up to a point. But I've never liked or understood Hailun's marketing and I think there is a difference between an innovation and an engineered cost savings.