

Steinway's 600,000th piano, the Fibonacci - scottcha
http://www.steinway.com/news/press-releases/steinway-sons-marks-a-historic-milestone-with-the-unveiling-of-the-companys-600000th-piano/

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sam
If you're in NYC I highly recommend the tour of the Steinway factory in
Queens. You need to make reservations months in advance. It was an absolutely
amazing to see the entire process from start to finish. The tooling involved
in piano making is unlike anything I'd ever seen.

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makeset
But skip their Manhattan showroom if you'd like to maintain any respect for
the brand. The sales staff was obnoxious enough to make me walk out, checkbook
in hand, over to the Bösendorfer store.

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sizzzzlerz
In 2013, PBS broadcast a show titled Note By Note: The Making of Steinway
L1037 which followed the construction of one of these grand pianos from the
selection of materials to the final tunings. The skills required in the
construction are very diverse and Steinway has employees who've been doing
this work for decades. It is highly precise work. As has been said before, any
one can chisel away wood; its knowing what wood needs to be removed that
matters.

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gtrubetskoy
[http://www.pbs.org/program/note-by-note/](http://www.pbs.org/program/note-by-
note/)

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whafro
"As I considered the number 600,000, the Fibonacci spiral came to mind."

Maybe I took this too literally, but 600,000 isn't a fibonacci number, and
neither are 6, 60, or 600. Anyone have a better read on what he means by this?

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mattyohe
Maybe he's looking at the number 6 and seeing a spiral?

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mikeash
Looks that way to me. If you take that picture of the piano and rotate it, it
looks like a big number 6:
[http://i.imgur.com/YnuV0YY.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/YnuV0YY.jpg)

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odabaxok
Add the five circles to it in the spiral and you get 6OOOOO.

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erikpukinskis
To me, this is the worst kind of "design". The article only talks about
decoration. No mention of music or how the object will be used, whatsoever.
Just how fancy the inlays are. </grumpy interaction designer>

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knieveltech
Focusing on the details that differentiate it from a "standard" model seems
reasonable. We all agree that it is a piano, and as such is capable of being
played to make music. What, specifically, were you hoping for here?

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Roodgorf
Agreed. My guess is they didn't really do anything different internally. Aside
from speaking subjectively about stuff like its particular timbre which may be
affected by the type of wood used, but wouldn't be that insightful to just
read IMO, there's not much else to mention aside from cosmetics.

~~~
knieveltech
Pretty much. They could have replaced all of the text with: "Piano, now with
5000% more bling. Because 600,000th." and then added like 50 more pictures to
the page. That would have been ok in my book. Perhaps I spend too much time on
Reddit.

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IshKebab
Maybe should have had more than one small photo...

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odabaxok
True. Here are more photos:
[http://www.classicfm.com/instruments/piano/steinway-
fibonacc...](http://www.classicfm.com/instruments/piano/steinway-fibonacci/)

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valera_rozuvan
Google cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NRjch1b...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NRjch1bJp44J:www.steinway.com/news/press-
releases/steinway-sons-marks-a-historic-milestone-with-the-unveiling-of-the-
companys-600000th-piano/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ua)

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spoiledtechie
Its sad to see that the piano is dying culturally. If i believe a dealer I met
just 6 months ago, Steinway makes less than 500 a year. Its a dying form and
its going the way of the dodo bird.

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anc84
How long does a piano last? Surely the market is saturated at some point,
especially for extremely expensive pianos like these.

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theOnliest
It depends on how much it's played. A Steinway in your home is likely to last
a lifetime or more. The Steinway in the recital hall at our school is between
20 and 30 years old (I think), and well past its prime. It's played (hard)
probably 4-6 hours a day, and eventually they just wear out. It would make a
fine piano for someone's house, but it's no longer a performance-quality
instrument. (Our own personal piano is a pre-WWII instrument, a 5'9" Knabe
with ivory keys. It's been rebuilt once, and is a little...quirky, and could
probably do with another rebuilding. It was also a very good deal for two
just-out-of-grad-school musicians.)

Some music schools have contracts with Steinway where they get all-new
instruments every year, which are sold back to Steinway at the end of the year
who sells them as used instruments. I'd imagine (but have no evidence) that
music schools in general are one of the largest consumers of pianos. At our
undergrad institution of ~200 majors, we have probably 30-40 pianos in the
building. My graduate school probably had upwards of 200, and employed 3 full-
time piano technicians to maintain them.

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TheOtherHobbes
My gf's Steinway is nearly a hundred years old. If they're refurbished every
30-40 years or so and kept in conditions that make sure the frame/case don't
warp or crack, they can last indefinitely.

It's relatively trivial to do a minor refurb to replace and realign
hammers/felts, rather more expensive to replace the tunings pegs and strings,
quite a big deal to do all the above and replace the soundboard too.

Gf's instrument is getting near to needing a complete rebuild, which we're
estimating will cost around £6k and take a few months.

I can appreciate the interest in digital instruments, but nothing sounds close
to the sonic richness, weight, projection, and detail of the real thing. You
certainly can't play classical piano music on a sampled keyboard and have it
fill a concert hall the way you can with a Steinway Model D.

~~~
organsnyder
The same thing has happened with pipe organs. There, the cost of a physical
instrument is much larger—modest instruments are well over six figures, with
many instruments reaching $1 million. Digital organs have found a place in
many venues—especially those, such as concert halls, that only use them
infrequently. However, there is still a thriving community of builders
churning out new pipe organs, and a bank of speakers still can't match the
power of thousands of individual pipes.

I saw an organ in the Netherlands that dates to the 1700's, and has been
played by many legendary composers (including Haydn and Mozart, IIRC). While
it's obviously seen continuous maintenance, it's still playable and used for
performances today.

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supercoder
Is there a Kickstarter ?

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chki
With a european (or at least german) IP address this redirects to
"[http://eu.steinway.com/de/"](http://eu.steinway.com/de/").

"[http://eu.steinway.com/de/news-
events/pressemitteilungen/ste...](http://eu.steinway.com/de/news-
events/pressemitteilungen/steinway-sons-600000-fluegel-fibonacci/") would be
the link for Germany.

Edit:

Spanish: "[http://eu.steinway.com/es/noticias-y-eventos/notas-de-
prensa...](http://eu.steinway.com/es/noticias-y-eventos/notas-de-
prensa/steinway-sons-600000th-piano-fibonacci/")

French: [http://eu.steinway.com/fr/nouveautes/communiques-de-
presse/s...](http://eu.steinway.com/fr/nouveautes/communiques-de-
presse/steinway-sons-600000th-piano-fibonacci/)

Italian: [http://eu.steinway.com/it/notizie-eventi/comunicati-
stampa/s...](http://eu.steinway.com/it/notizie-eventi/comunicati-
stampa/steinway-sons-600000th-piano-fibonacci/)

Russian: [http://eu.steinway.com/ru/novosti-i-sobytija/press-
relizy/st...](http://eu.steinway.com/ru/novosti-i-sobytija/press-
relizy/steinway-sons-600000th-piano-fibonacci/)

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odabaxok
...and English: [http://eu.steinway.com/en/news-events/press-
releases/steinwa...](http://eu.steinway.com/en/news-events/press-
releases/steinway-sons-600000th-piano-fibonacci/)

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witty_username
Thanks, after opening the link in the tile I was pretty confused.

