Harvey Chao opened an enjoyable nest of snakes with this [010411 MMD]:

> Consider that the dynamic range of a CD is on the order of 90 dB or
> so, and that is a reasonable approximation of totally silent to near
> concert hall levels, is it unreasonable that a manually played piano
> should have/be capable of an approximately similar range, and if so,
> what expectation is reasonable to achieve for a reproducing
> instrument?  60 dB or more would somehow not surprise me at all.

Don't forget that the 70-decibel range of a concert grand piano is
shrunk to around 60 dB on records, even after reexpansion by Dolby
to suppress noise in quiet stretches.

The reproducing piano makers didn't have to worry about 70 dB, because
they were not only replaying on smaller pianos, they were replaying for
middle-aged ladies trying to have a good gossip over the music, so the
world-class artists they were hiring to make rolls were brutally reined
back by the roll editors so as to behave themselves and not upset the
market.  If you do a roll concert in a big, big hall, you have to get
back to concert dynamics for the thing to sound even remotely
convincing.

So Duo-Art performs perfectly well with its 16 steps of around 3 dB
each, amounting to 50 dB.  In a concert hall this is stretched back
to 70 dB by using higher pump powers and in some cases tweaking the
response curve to get some reasonable quiet playing (No two impresarios
of the public roll recital will agree on how this should be done;
indeed, all the ones I know regard all the others as learners.)

So, as Douglas Henderson says, never expect an automatic piano to bring
you true Paderewski or Arrau.  If they came and practised in your
house, you'd probably stop them anyway as being likely to damage your
piano.  That kind of playing is something quite apart from polite salon
entertainment.  Just be glad someone took some trouble at the dawn of
recording technology to make some kind of record from which, with a few
suitable adjustments, we can relive the playing of the masters.

Incidentally, when Denis Hall, who makes a business of correcting
professional music critics' wrong impressions of the player piano, sets
out to make comparison CDs of roll playing to match with contemporary
78 rpm discs of the same pianists, he doesn't have to doctor the output
of his two superb Duo-Art grands.  It seems as though the old record
companies used similar pianos in their studios.  So what you hear on
a roll may not represent the artist in concert, but it is much closer
to what you heard of them on a disc 80 years ago -- and probably for
similar reasons.

Dan Wilson, London