Bruce Sexauer wrote:
"The closer to the center of the the top, the more difference "it" makes. There for the bridge is more important than the binding. "
Yup. If the guitar is to make any sound at all, the bridge has to move. Adding mass or stiffness at the bridge, or the bridge plate, will probably have a larger affect on the overall output than adding the same mass to the binding, or the neck or the headstock.
It gets complicated when you start to talk about the 'tone' though. The problem is, in part, that your hearing is not very sensitive to fairly large changes in power at normal levels, but can be really sensitive to the addition of sound at the threshold level. So; if you have a 'pure' sine wave tone at, say, 500 Hz and 60 dB-A, and you double the power (to 63 dB-A, as it happens), you will probably only just hear that as an increase in 'loudness'. You actually have to put in ten times the power (go from 60 to 70 dB-A) for it to sound twice as loud. However, if you start with the same pure tone at 60 dB-A, and add in a harmonic at, say, 2000 Hz, so that the overall sound level increases only 1 dB, you should be able to hear the change in timbre easily. This has to do with the mechanics of the ear, at least in part.
What this means is that a lot of stuff that doesn't alter the output of the guitar in any easily measurable way could very well change the tone noticeably. It almost sounds like a paradox, but it's not: some stuff that's easy to hear is hard to measure, and some stuff that's hard to hear is easy to measure. It's one of the things that makes research 'interesting'.
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