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| Finland birch |
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| Curly maple |
Laminated Finland Birch
The laminated soundboards we use on the Ravenna 26, Ravenna 34, Allegro 26 & Crescendo 34 models are made of the highest quality birch plywood imported from Finland. In addition to being time efficient for us to use in building, this material provides a nice, even sound, an attractive look, and an inherent strength and stability.
Mahogany & Spruce
Solid wood soundboards, which we use on all our other models, typically give more resonance, volume, and clarity than a laminated soundboard can. In addition, we do something unique with our solid wood soundboards to gain the sound we’re after.
Early in our development process, we conducted “blind” experiments with a panel of harp players and a series of test harps with different tone woods and soundboard thicknesses. The players chose Honduras mahogany for its resonance and clarity in the mid and treble ranges, but preferred spruce for its warm, “fat” sound in the bass. If we were bound by the tradition of using a single tone wood, this would have presented a dilemma. Re-thinking the traditional approach, we wondered why we couldn’t simply use each wood where it produced the best results.
So we created a two-part soundboard, loved the results, and determined that for our larger harps we would use spruce in the bottom third of the range and mahogany in the top two thirds. We overlaid the tone wood with a thin veneer of book-matched figured hardwood for strength and beauty. We believe this approach has given us the best of both woods.