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Comment by eigenvector | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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.

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