[charles Tauber]

Originally Posted by Picker2

After a zillion posts about Taylor's new V-Class bracing in two or three other threads, I open a new thread in order to go deeper into one of Taylor's claims...

There is much that can be said related to the topic. In the interest of brevity, I'm not going to say most of it - I'm not going down that rabbit hole.

First, anyone can claim anything one wants. Claiming it doesn't make it "true". Science has methods for determining if claims are valid or not. Some people aren't particularly interested in the validity of a claim and simply want to believe in the absence of supporting evidence or even in contradiction to the evidence. This can be seen in many aspects of human behavior.

Second, even is science does show that a claim is valid, there is the question of whether or not humans can detect the result. Suppose, that the V bracing does improve intonation, does it do it sufficiently that people can hear the difference with an un-aided ear, or is it just something detectable by measuring instruments?

Third, the behaviour of a real-world guitar is a very complex object. Too complex, with too many variables, to fully and accurately model its behaviour. Typically, what scientists do in such situations is to simplify the real-world object so that a meaningful model can be constructed. If the real-world situation is overly simplified, the model created no longer has much relevance to the real-world object who's behaviour it is intended to model. Modeling the guitar as an equalizer might have some conceptual validity, but is too simple a model to really understand the real-world object and its behaviour.

Fourth, further to the above, in the 1960's, physicist Michael Kasha created a model of how the classical guitar works and, based upon that, stated that a classical guitar is designed all wrong. Based upon this models/physics understanding of the guitar, he redesigned many aspects of the classical guitar. History has shown that what he did had little lasting relevancy and few regarded his innovations as "improvements".

Fifth, intonation is mostly directly influenced by two factors. The first is an increase in string tension caused by stretching a string when the string is fretted. The second is inharmonicity. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_acoustics)

It is unlikely that the choice of bracing used on a guitar top or back has significant influence on how much string tension is increased due to fretting a string. (I'm not aware of any scientific research having been performed that links the two.) One could postulate that with the top not being rigid, some flexion of the top occurs in response to the string tension being increased by fretting. The effect would be small. One could postulate by changing the flexion of the top, one could have some effect on this behaviour. I think it unlikely to be audible, but one could postulate such a situation.

Whether or not the inharmonicity can be reduced by changing the top bracing is an interesting question. Maybe it can, but that would have to be shown, if a valid claim.

Last, in general, of the factory-built guitars out there, in my experience, Taylor's tend to play well in tune (i.e. have good intonation), better, in general, that many others. Many guitar players seem content with the poor intonation found on most guitars. Will improving the intonation by some small margin over the existing Taylor guitars be a major draw for the average guitar player who is content with the existing standard of poor intonation found on most guitars? Is the actual improvement relevant, or is it just the claim of improvement that matters to many buyers?

EDIT: as others' have pointed out, it might well be that he is using the term "intonation" to means whatever he wants it to mean.

Originally Posted by mrgraveline

I am not a physicist...

Let me just ask you this... Which is commonly regarded as having more pure tone and less “chaos” as Andy puts it... A long stringed grand piano or an upright with shorter strings.

As mrgraveline suggests, see the piano acoustics link above.

Originally Posted by dodge

I'd be interested in the opinion of some of the luthiers on the forum. Hopefully they'll chime in at some point.

The proof is in the pudding. What more can one say? If one plays one and finds that it is better is some way, it's an improvement. If one plays one and doesn't find it is better is some way, it is, at best, one person's opinion over another's, or, at worst, marketing hype.

If one just wants to believe, proof is irrelevant and what the marketing claims say is true, without question.