Rob Case said of the 9' 6" Duo-Art Steinway grands (041122 MMDigest):

> These pianos must have been the ones built to show off the Duo-Art
> for concerts with orchestras, therefore specially encoded rolls had
> to be made for them for the dynamics to work effectively enough to
> fill a concert hall.  Does anybody know what happened to them all?

Is there a record of re-coding being done in this way?  The usual
procedure at Aeolian Hall in London was for ordinary rolls to be used
and the overall suction levels to be re-adjusted for concert hall
dynamics.  This was known as "Knightleyising" after the sales engineer
whose job it was.  Naturally it enabled any roll from the Aeolian stock
to be demonstrated with reasonable fidelity.

Exactly the same procedure is used today with the two London-based
Duo-Art pushups (conversions from 65/88n Pianola and 73/88n Phonola
respectively) belonging to Peter Davis and the Pianola Institute, when
they are used in large halls on concert grand pianos.

Pianists are (and I think I am) surprised that tinkering of this gross
order does nothing audible to disturb the bass-to-treble balance of the
performance.  Somehow you'd expect the bass to be too loud.  But, it
seems, the increased weight of concert grand bass hammers compared to
those on the six-foot grands the rolls were designed for is just right
to offset this tendency.

Dan Wilson, London