Ironically, one of the biggest obstacles to this progress comes from the manufacturers’ own marketing departments. Modern piano designers are beginning to make progress in mitigating the problems inherent in the very small piano.

Another area to pay attention to is the transition between the tenor and bass here, the lowest unwrapped treble strings can sometimes give off an indistinct or otherworldly-sounding pitch much different from the wrapped strings just below. (If you can no longer hum the note, the pitch is probably not clear enough to discern.) If this point on the keyboard is well within the normal range of the music you play, the piano may not give you the musical enjoyment you’re looking for. So when trying out a small piano, play each note in the bass to see how low you can go before the pitch becomes unclear.

When the inharmonicity is extreme, however, each harmonic suggests a different fundamental, thus confusing the ear, which hears an indistinct pitch. (This happens to some extent with all pianos it’s just much worse in small ones.) The problem here is that the fundamental frequency of a bass string is weak in comparison to its harmonics, and the ear “hears” the pitch of the note largely by listening to the harmonics and inferring from them which fundamental would have produced them. The extra thickness makes them stiffer, causing the harmonics they produce to deviate from their theoretical frequencies, in a phenomenon known as inharmonicity.

Normally among the longest in a piano, these copper-wrapped strings must be made thicker than normal to compensate for the length that the piano’s small size makes impossible. The place to begin is with the strings in the low bass.

Weber upright piano review