by David Palmer formerly of Jethro Tull, (now Dee Palmer following “alteration” surgery last year) to an orchestra:
“Would someone please explain to them the difference between A-440 and an elephant’s fart?”
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Don’t get me started. There’ll be all these people getting their weapons ready with electronic tuners set to A440, and the resulting tunings will still be all over the place. I’ve decided that there’s no such thing as “A440”. It’s just a ruse, a way to dupe the music community into buying more gadgets. 
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(Piper): “I’m not flat. I’m spot on. I used my tuner.”
(Me): “Look at this tuning slide. You could drive a friggin’ truck through it.”
(Piper): shrugs
(Me): gnashes teeth, tries instead to accommodate for the wettish melodeon
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Now and then I’ll ask bodhránaí to gimme an “A” when I’m tuning up. Some of them actually make a point to have it!
I try to play with everyone sharp because I find it easier to play with my tuning slide all the way in–for comforts sake…Unfortunatley the string players are always the ones a little tiffed as they seem to be attached to electronic tuners. But then again I don’t have 8 strings to tune, just one flute.
People seem to be amazed that I don’t use a tuner on my cittern. Tried that, and found that I get better and more uniform results with my ear alone. I’m amazed that they’re amazed.
DM-
are you absolutely sure that your CD player is spot on? It sounds like you have less than 1% discrepancy. In the good old days a transcription turntable would have a speed adjustment and strobe so that you could tune the playback speed. I don’t know if that is even relevant to CD technology but maybe…
Roger
I usually don’t use a tuner when tuning up my fiddle. I just get an A from the concertina player. Like Nanohedron, I trust my ear more than tuners. Plus there does tend to be varying accuracy in tuners to top it off. In response to Michael Coleman’s post about tuning sharp, I don’t know about others, but I don’t like tuning sharp for the simple fact that it’s more of a pain with strings then going flat and it doesn’t sound as good! I think the flute sounds better at or below concert pitch too, though it is easier to play sharp for sure. If I had it my way, I’d play with C or C# instruments all the time. Lucky for me, a piper friend has a half C set. He anchors our session and we’ve toyed with the idea of making it a C session for a day sometime.
But which one has the best tone? An African or Indian elephant?
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“…a piper friend has a half C set. He anchors our session and we’ve toyed with the idea of making it a C session for a day sometime.”
Let me know and I’ll be there!
Speaking of great (or good anyway) lines …this from Alley Oop yesterday
http://www.comics.com/comics/alleyoop/archive/alleyoop-20040927.html