Sound hole size

I've heard that the size of a uke's soundhole can have an effect on the sound, but must be balanced into the overall design & build, which makes sense. I thought that a bigger soundhole would almost always yield more volume, but not sure if that's true. Whaddya think? Here's pics of some tenors, a vintage Martin 12-fret, another more recent 12 fret, and a Kala Elite. The soundhole on the Martin looks substantially bigger to me.

ALL things being equal, maybe. But ALL things are very rarely equal. So all you can really trust are your ears and sensibilities. I imagine most builders use the size soundhole that fits the sound of their ukes the best.

EDIT: To elaborate, I guess the bottom line is, soundhole size (along with 100 other things) would NEVER be a consideration for me since there's no way to know how much or little it impacts the sound. Either it's a uke I like or it isn't.

Well, I would not be tempted to grab a saw and find out.

Although it could be an interesting experiment with a junk instrument

EDW said:

Well, I would not be tempted to grab a saw and find out.

Although it could be an interesting experiment with a junk instrument

Click to expand...

Barring that, you could cut smaller holes in cardboard or thin wood (?) and attach them and see what happens. But then you'd be introducing another variable. I wonder if any builders will provide an answer.

It's also interesting because the introduction of the side sound port doesn't seem to have affected the size of the front sound hole.

We just had a recent thread in the builder's subforum about soundhole size:

https://forum.ukuleleunderground.com/showthread.php?147093-sound-hole

Soundhole size impacts the resonant frequency of the instrument which impacts what we perceive as it's tone - a larger soundhole shifts the resonant frequency higher. Having done back to back experiments, I can definitely confirm that there's an easy-to-detect impact on tone.

If you're keeping everything else consistent there's also a secondary impact since a larger soundhole means a smaller top (you're removing some of the top area).

All that said, I think it's important to remember that soundhole size is one of many variables, so it's always risky to compare instruments from different builders/models/constructions/woods/body shapes/etc if you're trying to determine impact of just that one variable. The degree of impact you get from different soundhole sizes (assuming you're within the realm of what's typical) is probably the same order of magnitude of impact you get from swapping very different string types, or the difference between a hardwood top and a spruce top, etc.