I cannot believe that Joel van Lennep would make an instrument with the design flaws your comments imply. Could it be that my lute does not live up to your expectations, because it is a 14 course archlute. (BTW, Suzanne seems to have a space problem too.) The courses have to be close together for the instrument to be playable, it would seem. The distance between the string of the 6th and 7th courses is is roughly 4mm, 8mm, and 4mm. If pairs of the individual courses were to be 5mm apart, this would become 5mm, 6mm, 5mm. It would introduce a 6.5th course, a revolutionary design! My guess is that the compromise that was made tries to avoid the the clanging disaster by creating more space at the nut. Actually, there is more: the octave strings are slightly closer to the sound board than the fundamentals in both courses.
My 10 course alto lute is 50 cm and very small in the bowl. This limits the possible length of the bridge. My bass courses also tend to have the strings at about 4mm, but they would not all fit if the strings were moved farther apart. So in my case, the compromise was made on this instrument to put the strings closer than optimal to make them *fit*. That's what happens when you have a small 10 course alto. So perhaps your 14 course archlute has similar size and geometry constraints.
But it does seem like the spacing at the nut could be done as you like. Mine was not optimal at first either, but I have moved things around to much closer to right. At least that problem was sort of fixable.
Suzanne To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
