While spinets did the job for a little while, the musician playing it quickly learned the differences between spinets and traditional upright or grand pianos.īecause of limited space inside the spinet piano, even a simple tuning can be a monumental task. Cheaper parts were used to keep costs down, meaning quality inside and out was shoddy at best. Because of a huge increase in competition in the 1950s and 1960s, price came down along with workmanship. While many of the early spinets were of good quality, in many cases quality was compromised as time went on. When a key is struck, the movement pulls on rods to engage the action, resulting in poor leverage and thus a poorer quality of sound.
In a spinet, the action is dropped below the keys. A traditional piano makes sound by having a striking key cause a hammer to strike the piano string, resulting in immediate sound. The keys are shorter in order to make room for the drop action. Shorter strings reduce the quality of the sound, especially in the deeper keys.Īnd because of the smaller casing, it also impacts the mechanism used to produce sound. Because of the smaller size, the strings are shorter. The casing for a spinet piano is smaller than that of a regular piano. They were smaller in size, cheaper in price, and inferior in sound. Spinet pianos were manufactured between the 1930s and the 1990s. Although many wanted a piano for entertainment, the traditional uprights and grand pianos were simply out of reach. They remembered the good times from before yet no longer had the income to live life the way they used to. People were still recovering from the economic downturn that rocked society. The spinet piano goes back to the Great Depression.