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Comment by meddlepal | Hacker News Reader

My mother has a beautiful Steinway grand piano she inherited from her father. Anyone familiar with the size of a grand piano knows they more or less require a mid-sized room to themselves or a good chunk of a large room. They're also not worth that much anymore because the market for used grand's is tiny. So mot of the value is sentimental.

We are most likely going to have to get rid of it when she downsizes. My brother and I are unsure where we would ever put it and neither of us play the piano (probably one of my bigger regrets is not learning...). Neither of us want a 4,000SF house especially in New England where 4,000SF probably means older house and lots of maintenance from weather over many years.

Similar problem with the antique dining room and the billiard table (though I may try and save that one if I can).

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When I was a child studying piano, my dream was to own a grand piano. My parents could have never afforded such an extravagance, but did own a detached house in Toronto.

Now, I could easily afford a high-end piano, but could never dream of affording a house to put it in.

Are grand pianos actually any better than the best electric pianos? I mean if you're not playing in an actual concert hall. I was in an electricals shop in Japan a couple of years ago and a few of the electric pianos there were wonderful (some were also terrible).

I don't think that even vertical pianos come even close to any electric I played. The stringed one keys just feels different and it has a lot more nuance in sound. Maybe I have never played a really high end one, but in the same price range, just no comparison.

And no, I'm not some kind of nostalgic: whenever somebody gives me a paper book as a gift I try to find the ereader version because I prefer reading on an ebook.

Yes.

You just can't sample your way out of the problem of getting the sound of many strings resonating when you press a key, especially when you hold the right pedal.

Electronic pianos are good, and I have one, but they are a different instrument that doesn't do what a cheap cabinet piano can.

Yes, that is a good way of putting it. No one would ask whether an electric guitar is 'better' or 'as good' as an acoustic, they are simply different.

I enjoy owning an electric piano simply because it lets me practise with headphones in a small apartment, but it does not substitute fully for a mechanical piano.

I will say that the best electric pianos are starting to get very impressive. I was looking for a piano two years ago and tried the latest and greatest electric piano to humor a salesman. I was astounded at the fidelity of their model. If I played a chord, then depressed another set of keys (without actually striking the "string"), and then released the chord, it would catch the resonances from that chord in the "strings" of the depressed keys just like a real piano. I played on that piano for a while and wasn't able to find any behaviors that a real piano had that the electric piano couldn't also do short of reaching in and plucking a string with my fingernail.

The fact that you say "you just can't sample your way out of" indicates that your mental model of how electronic pianos work is about 20 years out of date, because current ones do get the many-strings-interaction right with complex physics models.

I have a Kawai CA97 and a grand piano, and I've occasionally asked guests to close their eyes and guess which one I'm playing, and people are usually not sure at all.

It's easy to fool the audience, but for the pianist it's still night and day. And I don't mean just emulating the control input, though that's not easy either, but more the subtle haptic feedback from the entire instrument- that makes you feel like it's not only you playing the piano, but also the piano is playing you.

I've used both high end mechanical pianos and high end electronic pianos, and the biggest difference I've noticed is that the electronic pianos only had stereo speakers. Mechanical pianos have spatially separate sound generators for each note, so you get a much better surround-sound effect as you move your head. However, there's no theoretical reason this couldn't be simulated with a sufficiently large number of loudspeakers.

They have apparently improved a lot in the best decade. I mean, ultimately it's just about finding the right algorithm; there are no unreproducible sounds coming out of a piano.

Lots of things that are fully described by relatively elementary physics are still impossible to model in real-time even with the most powerful computers, let alone the $5 microcontroller in an electric piano. You're right that there's no obvious physical reason why a 'perfect' electric piano couldn't exist, but it would probably be way more expensive than just building a mechanical piano which consists entirely of 19th century technology.

Why are you exaggerating the requirements so much? You don’t need it to be perfect and there is no issue with putting a high end SoC in a high end e-piano.

You set the bar at algorithmically reproducing every last sound that comes out of an analog piano. That's a hard problem to solve for the very small number of people who would care enough to purchase such a device when there's a perfectly good analog alternative that's been on the market since before the telephone was invented.

You may think I'm exaggerating the requirements, but I think you're underestimating the difficulty of solving what is at best a very hard physics problem in real time with imperceptible delay as a human carries out a sequence of physical manipulations that has taken them years or decades to learn. My $1,000 phone with the latest, greatest SoC can't open a PDF with a noticeable delay.

If your proposition is a middling approximation of an analog piano, you can already buy that at Costco for $500. Steinway and Bosendorfer don't seem particularly bothered about it.

Absolutely it's not even a contest.

Even an upright will sound much better than an electric. I've bought one of the best electric pianos you can buy (Yamaha N1 which has the same action as a grand piano) and it still didn't compare.

That's not to say the electric ones are bad but there is just much more nuance you can achieve on an acoustic.

Baby grands can work very well in a small house. I'm a pianist and I grew up playing a Chickering baby grand. It's a very good sounding piano; I think it sounds better than a lot of larger Steinways and Yamahas I've played. Cost was around $10k in the 1970's.

I grew up in a small house (1100 sqft, 2bd, 1ba), and I think it actually made the L-shaped living room feel bigger, even though it used almost 1/5 of the area.

I like the 'conservatory size', a bit larger than a 'baby', but still much smaller than a typical concert piano - anywhere from 170 to 210 cm.

It very well may have been conservatory size. I've definitely run into baby grands that were much smaller.

Are you sure? Have you ever seriously tried to buy a good piano?

I have, and I couldn’t find any cheap ones (i.e. cheaper than a very good digital piano).

The ones that look cheap in the small ads are generally in poor condition. The vintage ones in good condition are expensive, and new ones are expensive.

There's degrees of good. You can buy a respectable upright piano like the one I learned on for a few thousand dollars.

A few years ago I was looking at a Schimmel grand for $30,000 (CAD). That's a big purchase, but I could afford it, especially for something I'd use daily for the rest of my life.

A modest house in Toronto is now over $1 million, and appreciates annually as much as my entire annual net income. I will never afford that.

Though it's probably not a good time to buy a house in Toronto, it's easier to employ much more leverage on a house compared to a piano.

That's a big part of the problem.

Maybe cars are a better comparison, since the price is in the same ballpark?

I bet you could get a personal loan for a piano about as easily as you could get one for a car (from your bank, of course, not a car dealership).

> They're also not worth that much anymore because the market for used grand's is tiny.

To the right buyer that instrument will be worth a small fortune. The reason the market value is not that high is mostly because the few big names gobble up all the instruments they can to reduce the size of the secondary market so they can sell their instruments at the highest price they'll fetch.

That's also why there are hardly ever prices on the websites of the various sellers, they would give a hint about what the instruments value is which would make it harder for them to purchase instruments for a small fraction of their true value.

>The reason the market value is not that high is mostly because the few big names gobble up all the instruments they can to reduce the size of the secondary market so they can sell their instruments at the highest price they'll fetch.

Is that really a thing? Seems like a great way to lose money.

Not if you are refurbishing them, and then reselling them as "certified used" for a profit. Then you have captured more of the secondary market while still helping to maintain your new prices.

It's like how brand names manufacture "competing" store brand products right next to their brand name stuff.

It’s high risk and possibly illegal in some cases but people still attempt it https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornering_the_market

Going back a step, can someone explain the logic? If 'the few big names gobble up all the instruments they can', why doesn't this push the prices up?

Dunno about at the start of the endeavor, but if they manage to buy out the whole after-market such that they can build the expectation that no real market exists, then both buyers and sellers will not even attempt to sell/buy at “true” prices, and instead look directly at “certified” and new models only. If I value a car at $5000, but can’t find that price anywhere, then I simply have to accept that its being valued higher by the market. If I want to sell at $5000, but can’t find a buyer, same story. Even if both persons exist simultaneously, if they can’t find each other, then there will be no sale.

So by making use of the information disparity, and manipulating the perception of the used market, it should be possible to keep prices artificially high.

The same kind of strategy works for diamonds at least, where “used” diamonds are not worthy of usage, so prices are simply set by the businesses; I know the video game market is also trying to get in on it, by gobbling up used games (eg through gamestop), keeping them out of the secondary market early (by encouraging sequels, trade-ins, etc), which then lets them set the prices on them later (particularly useful when you want to sell emulated games on the e-shops)

All it requires is one guy putting this piano on craigslist every few months and that issue is solved.

If the general population of buyers does not expect to find grand pianos on craigslist, then why would they end up on craigslist to find it? More likely, the best hope you have is to sell it to someone who found it by accident, probably not even looking for such a thing at the time. And if selling grand pianos on craigslist is sufficiently rare, then it’ll naturally not change anyone’s expectations; it was just a lucky find.

And ofc, if you the adversarial company are purchasing out these rare sales as soon as they’re up, you can trivially maintain the illusion.

That individual sale might cost you more, but if the average seller sells for less because they don’t see a real market to sell in... it’s probably still a profitable illusion.

(I responded to your other comment, but this one covers some of the same ground.)

It still seems strange to me that this would work, when there are so many easy ways for piano enthusiasts to gather and communicate, and when it's such an expensive item (so if you knew the market was being manipulated, you wouldn't just throw up your hands and accept the hit, you'd look for a better deal).

I might be getting confused about the basic claim being made, though -- if sellers can achieve decent prices when they choose to demand them, but often don't realise this and therefore get ripped off by professional buyers; and if buyers can save money by buying directly from individual sellers, but are often unaware of this option (because there aren't a whole lot of pianos being sold this way, and they're not on the market for long); then I guess that does make sense.

> So by making use of the information disparity, and manipulating the perception of the used market, it should be possible to keep prices artificially high.

It seems like this would be really hard to pull off, though, because apparently they're simulateneously keeping prices artificially low.

I can see them keeping the casual buyer and seller ignorant of each other's existence -- especially if they're fixing up the pianos and selling them as 'certified refurbished' (or whatever), so they're not simply buying low and selling the exact same product high.

But wouldn't the whole thing crumble when a few enthusiasts got together and discussed their experiences as buyers and sellers -- or when a few sellers (whether through ignorance or knowledge) publically and successfully held out for higher prices?

See: diamonds.

I recently purchased a grand piano, and in the process I visited a lot of piano stores and got a very good sense of what is available and for how much. Large piano stores in the US will typically have some vintage Steinways for sale, whether or not they carry new Steinways.

Vintage Steinways often sell for roughly $20K. This price may include a lot of prep work by the dealer -- a dealer might replace all the strings, for example. I once visited a shop where the dealer gutted the instruments and more or less rebuilt them from scratch.

It's also reasonably common for dealers to have prices on their websites for used pianos. Not new pianos -- typically manufacturer contracts forbid this, and it's a high margin business.

I'd estimate that one could probably sell a vintage Steinway, if it's in good condition, to a dealer for in the neighborhood of $10K.

One might get more by advertising directly to buyers. However, this is a pain (it typically takes months to sell a piano). Moreover, any knowledgable buyer will hire a technician to inspect the instrument, and this could bring up all sorts of unpleasant surprises -- even if the instrument seems to be in good condition.

I’m in a very similar situation as you: my wife is inheriting a Steinway baby grand piano that needs internal repair, and needs to be shipped from Tucson to the Bay Area. It has a lot of sentimental value but not much resale value. It may cost up to $10k to ship it and get it repaired into a working state.

I live in a 2 bedroom condo in Oakland that cannot possibly fit the thing, nor do either of us play piano anymore. My thought was to repair it and then donate it to a local school auditorium and maybe write off the expenses but I haven’t looked into the details.

FWIW, a friend of a friend wanted to buy a Steinway and donate it to her daughter's prep school so the daughter would have a Steinway to play. (Yes, some people have a lot of money.) The prep school turned her down because they didn't want the cost of maintaining it. Anecdata and perhaps an outlier, but nonetheless.

Similarly I've seen some church congregations replace their small pipe organs with electric ones to reduce maintenance costs.

Similar thing with my uncle. He wanted to donate an organ to his church worth $100k+. They couldn't afford the insurance and maintenance on it.

I know some Tucsonans that might be interested.

The best bet would be to try to sell it locally. It may take a long time to find the right buyer, but knowing that the instrument is used and treasured by a musician may appease the sentimental side just as much or even more than keeping it around as a piece of furniture.

>probably one of my bigger regrets is not learning.

I started taking lessons a year ago, and I play well enough now to fool most strangers into thinking I know how to play. :) My highest achievement is playing half of this piece now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d72mZVxdylA (it's not me in the video).

Just go ahead and learn to play.

> My brother and I are unsure where we would ever put it and neither of us play the piano (probably one of my bigger regrets is not learning...).

It's never too late!

(But the grand piano still won't be practical even if you learn how to play it.)

Vintage Steinway is my dream piano. Sorry that you have to get rid of it.

Loft it: https://www.jefftk.com/p/lofted-grand-piano

Consider donating it to a school?

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