Of course, you could argue that there is merit to having low keys whose fundamental is below human hearing because the overtones would still be audible. But that seems to be of pretty limited use to me.
Of course, you could argue that there is merit to having low keys whose fundamental is below human hearing because the overtones would still be audible. But that seems to be of pretty limited use to me.
At the upper end it's perfectly possible to reach the end of the treble scale, so maybe the 97 key Bösendorfer has extra treble keys in addition to extra bass keys. I haven't seen one though.
https://www.stuartandsons.com/108keys.html
They have an elaborate explanation of why they did it, and they are a commercial outfit, but the basic reason still seems to be "we wanted to see if we could".
This was surprising for me, I thought no way is this almost the range of hearing.
But a quick calculation showed it to be right: The range of human hearing is approximately from 20Hz to 20kHz which is ~10 octaves (20*2^10 ~= 20k). 10 octaves would need 120keys, so ~2.5 Octaves more than the 88 keys range.