Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Are pianos fundmentally too loud ?

If the hall has good acoustic properties, any seat should be fine, but that does not mean that all seats are acoustically equivalent.

There is usually an optimal area in every hall, and I've noticed that the sears there often are the most expensive seats, so the venue likely is well aware of the acoustic properties of the hall.

I never said all seats were acoustically equivalent, only that I had no problems with the piano being too soft. The seats in Carnegie Hall are priced according to their distance from the stage with the orchestra and box seats being the most expensive.

The front 5-10 rows are not cheaper than the priciest seats?

Won't work on grands as they shift the action sideways to play on fewer strings when you press the soft pedal - real name una corda.

Update on the etymotic earplugs, they don't seem to work any better than the regular memory foam plugs I already own.

The subjective experience is that it's very colorizing, not the flat response they're claiming in the literature.

The attenuation overall is about the same regular mem-foam. They do allow a bit more sibilance at the very high end (listening to other music), but this is well out of a piano's general range.

Can't say it sounds bad, but it's not as special/transparent as I'd hoped.

jeff, are the memory foam plugs OTC or prescription?

jeff, what does that mean? Can they all be destroyed? Wouldln't that cause constant vertigo? I'm prone to vertigo.
My diet is mostly grains, fruits and veggies, beans. I eat chicken maybe 4x a month, and fish the rest of the time. No beef.

You really want to get medical advice from a pianist on a piano forum? A physician can diagnose if this is the cause of hearing loss, and prescribe treatment.

Pianos are too quiet..... and so is the orchestra!

Whole food Plant based means exactly what it says, Eating whole foods, that are also plants. Whole foods is the difference between an orange and orange juice. Plant based is similar to vegan, but know that Oreo cookies are vegan, don't eat that because it's not a whole food, it's a refined food.

DO NOT eat fish for any reason. Fish is highly neurotoxic due to the mercury content. From modern industrial dumping into the ocean, fish is also the most polluted meat in terms of PCBs and Dioxins.

Give WFPB a month/2month try, and see if it helps. You're already well acquainted with Rice and Beans, so that's half the battle. Cut out the animal corpses for a bit, see how you feel.

Indeed, notice how no one ever complains about hearing loss in third world countries where animal products are rarely part of the diet

Also make sure to sleep facing the rising sun in the east while maintaining a Balasana yoga pose to improve bloodflow and and vitamin D production to aid in regeneration of the stereocilia.

Make sure to also drink lots of kombucha as the probiotics will aid in the health of the endolymph of the cochlear duct.

...

You also need to sleep lying on your back - very stiffly - with arms crossed over your chest. This is to ward off evil spirits that may damage your hearing. Fix your head in place with a stone pillow (carved by Michelangelo to your head's contours), so you won't be tempted to turn over and squash your ear.

I blame my failure to do that for my slightly-less-than-perfect hearing, despite trying to perfect it for almost a century. Small mercies, however - I can still hear the squeaking of a mouse that my cat can't hear (not that I have a cat).

Thats probably part of the problem.

I made those exact same jokes when I first heard about WFPB.

I was the BIGGEST Keto fanatic, because well, I never really looked that deep into it, and it agreed with my world view at the time. I even added butter to coffee, that's how much keto-koolaid I was drinking.

THEN, I actually read a Pro-WFPB book <in an attempt to debunk it>. And holy [censored], the flood gate opens, and I realize Keto along with general meat-consumption is the most insane thing ever.

If I had to pick 1 fact that stood out most, Put on your engineering glasses, and actually LOOK at what CAFO (Concentrated animal feeding operations) is.

For example Hog farming. They take 100s of Hogs, put them side by side. These animals are ontop of a metal grate, there's about 2-3 feet of space under that grate. The animal just goes to the bathroom right there. They are living in a Giant Toilet with 100s of other hogs. You guys remember Cholera, that was really a civil engineering problem due to insufficient sewage waste treatment. There is literally a Giant Lake of animal waste, which they (only partially) pump to an open air storage pool right next to the Hog building, literally 10-20 feet distance away. In even worse scenarios, they have operations where there's not even the grate, the hogs are just knee deep in their own poo. The conditions such as this is cruel, but EVEN if we ignore all the animal rights issue, which frankly I don't care about either, This is plain unsanitary. There are gases and fermentation happens with wet sewage. The hogs are breathing all that in, it's incorporated into their flesh. Since they stay in there for 6+ months. It's not something you can wash off. The conditions are So bad, that we use 70% of all antibiotics produced IN the united states in Animal agriculture; if it weren't the case, these animals would all die in the CAFOs. Then with all the drugs we shot them up with, and the toilet situation, you put that in your mouth. /hesitate

I'm not really surprised.

Diet and nutrition is almost religious with the way people believe and preach about them, with enough false science and half truths to backup any specific doctrine.

With regards to agriculture practices, I have looked into it in the past and I will just say it's impressive stuff. There's lots of information that can be used for shock value to try and convince people to a specific way of thinking, for both plants and animals.

Hi

Short answer - sometimes yes. Longer story follows:

My parents had an early 20th century Bluthner Pianola (1913 I think). When I was young about 50 years ago we used to play Piano rolls of the 1812 Overture and other famous classical works on it. It seemed loud to me then.

In the 1970s the player part of the mechanism stopped working (pipes corroded etc) and the
player/Piano mechanism was removed (a substantial piece), so then it could only be used as a normal upright Piano, but one with a huge sound box. Then it was very loud. When I got older and started to hammer out boogie-woogie and rock 'n' roll on it, it was even louder and I think at an ear damaging level.

The Pianola was in my family until we had to clear my Mum's house, when she had to go into a home 2 years ago. Happily it was sold to a specialist shop, who planned to restore it, as far as I know.

Cheers

@ simon_b, Would you say the larger cavity made the sound Louder, or was it only a perceptual change in loudness, for example, if it sounded brighter, or the sustain was longer.

Hi jeffcat

I think it was louder in reality. But I know nothing about the physics of sound acoustics, and I'm happy to accept that it might just have been a perception of mine.

It's also worth mentioning that my hearing changed a lot in the 50 years the Pianola was in the family. I'm pretty sure I damaged my hearing playing in a loud blues/rock band in the 2000s. So in the last decade or so my perception of the sound was different from when I was younger, as I no longer hear the high treble end as well as I used to.

But I've played a few uprights over the years, and none of them were as loud as the Pianola.

I wish I'd downloaded an app and measured the decibels it produced before we sold it in early 2019. But at the time the stress of clearing the house and sorting Mum out, meant stuff like that never crossed my mind.

Cheers