Topic: Bug? Significant inharmonicity even with 10m piano
Hi all,
Tonight I took some measurements of the Pianoteq 7.2.0 PRO "Grand Ant Petrof" sound with the string length set to 10m. The manual says:
"Inharmonicity decreases very rapidly with string length. Experiment by changing the String length. The difference will be most evident in the bass range. You can choose up to a 10 meter long piano! At such a size, there is almost no inharmonicity. People say that piano manufacturers dreamed of producing pianos without inharmonicity..."
However, even at 10 meters there is significant inharmonicity, at least for the notes I tested. In particular, the harmonics track very well to the standard Harvey Fletcher equation for stretched partials due to string stiffness.
For instance, for "B" above A4 (so about 494 Hz), I measured the inharmonicity coefficient "B" equal to 0.000854634239097124, to which the harmonics have an extremely good fit. Given this, we can then measure the cents deviation of each harmonic from its "just" version with no inharmonicity. Those deviations are:
                         1          0.85100734626789
                         2          3.39902100548722
                         3          7.62911367488012
                         4          13.5167286476116
                         5          21.0281493252212
                         6          30.1211301330984
                         7          40.7456645903049
                         8          52.8448621854427
                         9          66.3559033372764
                        10          81.2110410865593
                        11          97.3386191477907
                        12          114.664078308312
                        13          133.110926583857
                        14          152.601652675856
                        15          173.058566779242
                        16          194.404557344766
                        17          216.563756744031
                        18          239.462112719482
                        19          263.027865893305
                        20          287.191936388401
So you can see there is still some very significant deviation from true inharmonicity. Even the 7th harmonic, for instance, is almost a quarter tone sharp, the 11th harmonic is a semitone sharp, etc.
This coefficient barely seemed to change *at all* with the string length. The only strings whose coefficients changed were the very low ones. I did check the "Note Edit" view as well and all of them supposedly changed to 10m.
How can I decrease the inharmonicity to 0? I would certainly like to request this be possible somehow. Is this a bug?