Quote:
Originally Posted by KevWind
Unfortunately French Brubaker did not test all the same series of Taylor guitar , which may have directly addressed my question better.. (which I thought I made clear) about a standardized per build series and body shape model, with the same materials throughout . Oh well .........
Interesting to note and perhaps should be clarified that the French Brubaker tests , done at Taylor Guitars in 2007, were appearently testing 32 guitars from 7 different series , with 7 different back and side species materials, AND 2 different kinds of spruce top materials = Engelman and Sitka . Using what appears to be a handheld, modal impact hammer ...
And thus the variations in the test results appear to be as much or more derived from being and spread out over 7 different variables of body/side material and two different spruce tops . (and not testing the variations within the same back, sides and top materiels ) Which is not surprising and which would seem to make the term "Significant difference " less significant
"Significant" being ..... 2.24 hz variation and 2.23 % of the mean, ... spread out over the two different types spruce tops and 7 different body/side species ....
...While the French Brubaker is interesting it does actually address my original question. But again it doesn't really matter because I am content to wait to play one.
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Regarding "
the test results appear to be as much or more derived from being and spread out over 7 different variables of body/side material and two different spruce tops" we can see from your chart that Ovangol bodies give results ranging from 95Hz to 103Hz and rosewood from 97 to 103Hz, so still significant variation even within body species.
Whilst the top wood may be Sitka or Engelmann, an oft quoted phrase is "spruce is spruce" meaning that the mechanical and acoustical properties of the spruces overlap so much that very similar properties can be found in either species, so a species tag tells you very little about acoustical performance. Unless the species are sorted by particular values of their measured properties, they are essentially all from the same population.
It is worth considering how large a difference in resonant frequency needs to be to make a "significant difference" in performance for a truly responsive guitar. To minimise over-coupling problems (and hence possible intonation problems) resonances need to be placed as far as possible from scale tones. At main air resonance frequencies a semitone interval is ~6 Hz. To get within 1 Hz of target frequency demands quite a bit of accuracy. Checking against your chart, no more than a dozen of the 32 would pass that test for that particular resonance. For most of the 32 to pass that test, the standard deviation in first resonant frequency would need to be better than ~0.3%.
The proof of this pudding is inevitably in the hearing, and whether people like the sound of V bracing or not, I doubt that the intonation will be any different from previous offerings.