How one of America’s last piano manufacturers stays alive
thehustle.co
thehustle.co
My wife is a pianist who studied piano performance. We own a refurbished 1924 Steinway and we love it.
I’ve gotten the chance to play and hear many Steinways and a few Mason and Hamlins. My favorite piano I’ve ever heard was a 1920s Mason and Hamlin that was owned by my wife’s piano professor.
For us it seemed like the only way to get the kind of piano we wanted to own was to find one of the “golden era” pianos from the 1920s and refurbish it or find one that had been refurbished. It’s a lot of work so it’s expensive to do, but still a ton cheaper than buying a newer piano, and the sound and quality of the 1920s pianos can be excellent.
There is a notable lack of great piano technicians and tuners. We have an amazing one, but everyone else we have tried cannot make the instrument sing like he can. Some have been downright terrible. There is such an art to really getting the individual strings within a note in tune with each other to the level where the sound waves line up and sustain one another rather than canceling each other out and killing off the note quickly. My tuner says that most tuners don’t even know the difference or that it’s even a thing, and I believe him.
I hope the art of piano tuners and technicians doesn’t completely die off. It would be easy to see that happen.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Grand-Obsession/Perri...
(This is slight hyperbole, but Craigslist currently shows 8 free pianos in my area, ranging from beaten-up uprights to two really beautiful baby grands, one of which has apparently just been tuned. The folks looking to get a few hundred dollars for their pianos are effectively delusional. The going price of a decent used electronic keyboard, on the other hand, is about half the price of a new one.)
I hope to one day donate one to the local airport to become the first public good free to play airport piano in India.
My digital piano sounds way better than any of the uprights my family had, being made from samples of a $100k+ grand. It models sympathetic resonance of unplayed strings. It never goes out of tune and I can play it any time of day with headphones. The key action is acceptable, the pedal feel is good. I can’t see buying a real piano making much sense for me.
Key actions can be just as good as uprights or grands, it’s a matter of how much you want to pay. Kawaii in my opinion has best actions for electric.
But to return to the context of the original point, which is that most serious piano players are going to value an electronic keyboard that can adjust tuning systems a lot less than an acoustic instrument that just... Sounds better. In most musical contexts featuring keyboards you need equal temperament anyway, unless you're expecting the pianist to update the tuning system every time they play a chord with a different root. I'm not going to argue that well tuned music doesn't sound better, but it just isn't pragmatic for piano in most contexts.
This is why i laugh every time i see youtube videos comparing various models of super expensive grand piano : people will losten to them on their laptop speakers then conclude "oh i like this one better". Makes no sense at all..
Same here. It's very strange. It seems to me people can get used to anything—and that they have done so.
The atrocious speaker/sound systems in today's laptops are so bad that if retrofitted to ancient monophonic AM radios of the 1930s and '40s then those radios wouldn't have sold.
The fact that so many are prepared to accept such atrocious audio means there's no longer any choice for anyone like me who'd pay more for good audio—simply no manufacturer makes a laptop with good audio these days.
BTW, I did play piano a litte once so I've a bit of an understanding of what they're supposed to sound like.
If you want good sound from a laptop, the answer is pretty simple: 1) plug in some decent headphones, or 2) plug in some real speakers. You can get a pretty decent set of "PC speakers" consisting of satellite speakers and a subwoofer for not much money. You're not really supposed to listen to the laptop speakers if you care about sound and you're not traveling.
I find it funny that a lot of HN posts will expound in expletives about how a certain tech product is the best in class for example, how great macbook pro speakers are and then another poster will say that no laptop has ever had decent speakers…
Also, in one post “this dolby surround atmos reproduces everything about the concert, with hundreds of musicians it’s like I’m there” and then in the next post “speakers will never reproduce even the sound of one acoustic piano that’s been mistreated and mistuned, the piano will still sound better and the speaker will never replicate the magic of acoustic instruments” and then in the very next post start quoting how the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem proves that nobody ever needs anything over 44khz to reproduce exactly the sound of all acoustic instruments that ever existed.
The story, as always, is more complex than any of these hot takes, and tech folks usually refuse to accept that there are multiple factors at play.
This is not contradictory at all. "Best in class" means exactly that: the best out of the available selections. If they're all terrible, the best-in-class is the least terrible. MBP speakers may be best-in-class (I'm assuming, I don't know), while still being "crap" to someone who values high-fidelity sound.
It's more than just audio quality. Whilst I could spend time on quality, I'll address a serious issue with all modern laptops, that is they simply do not have enough audio gain.
Desigers design to the dynamic range allowed by the bit level and power output of the speakers/audio amplifiers—there is never anything left in reserve.
Let's go back to my 1930s radio receiver for comparison. Back then, a radio set with say a 5 Watt audio output would give 5W output when the radio station reached 100% modulation of its carrier signal. And to reach this condition the radio receiver would have its volume set to about half way (the volume potentiometer set to about 12 o'clock), so the listener could always increase the gain to 5W on soft low level audio. This was the normal situation with just about every radio receiver ever built in the pre-digital era.
That scenario is no longer possible with modern laptops (and much other digital equipment). In a noisy environment, you can no longer trade quality for distortion/clipping which one often wants to do. Same goes for audio recorded at low level, here one cannot reach full volume as there is no reserve audio gain. How many YouTube videos and MP3 files have you heard that have such low level audio that they're essentially inaudible? If you're like me then you'd have to answer hundreds if not thousands.
The fact is modern digital designers haven't a clue what to do when it comes to listener audio ergonomics. That they don't is a damn nuisance.
The fact that they need to spend some weeks training in an ancient radio factory is an indictment on the poor state of our modern tech education (why didn't their educators tell them to always design in reserve gain in situations such as this?).
> In a noisy environment, you can no longer trade quality for distortion/clipping which one often wants to do
Whenever a laptop comes out that lets you raise the volume to clipping, inevitably a bunch of users blow out their speakers and it become a support/warranty issue.
I once worked in the prototype lab of a very well known company that designed audio and television equipment and I can assure you speaker/amplifier matching is well known and understood.
Designing speakers that would clip (bottom out) and not self destruct happens all the time, it's a non issue as it doesn't really cost much extra (essentially nothing with small speakers).
The real issue is that some manufacturers started to use second rate products then they all followed suit—even those with 'named' brands that one paid extra for (but who got little in return).
The real problem was that both users and equipment reviewers didn't complain (or they didn't do so with sufficient vigor) and manufacturers let it slip, which was easy given the highly competitive nature of laptops where manufacturing cost are important.
—
Edit: I should add that this was rarely an issue in the past when substabtial gain reserves were a normal feature in equipment. Although it was occasionally a problem in high powered HiFi equipment, it was essentially never so in domestic radio sets. The question remains — then why is it now a problem in laptops?
My memory, and indeed any current example I posses, is more along the lines of "wow, it actually makes sound" rather than trying to pick instruments from the back rows in a symphony out.
However, early on (pre 2000), the components in laptops were often better built. From my experience, two brands come to mind - IBM Thinkpads and some of the Toshiba ones, especially the old 'luggables'. They also had more substantial frames/chassis which provided better baffling for the speakers.
Moreover, my early Toshiba laptops had genuine volume potentiometers with a knurled knob that protruded slightly from the side of the case (like those in old style transistor radios). This made adjusting the audio volume dead easy.
I'm sure that when this last bastion from the analog era was removed the 'digital brigade' cheered enthusiastically—but I certainly didn't, in fact I was damn annoyed.
That's the trouble: digital ideologues who'd better be seen dead than found with analog technology in hand together with those who don't know what the word 'ergonomics' means run the electronics design business these days. Combine that mentality with accountants who'd feint at the thought of the additional cost of an analog potentiometer over a couple of membrane switches and we've a recipe for a generation of products that are essentially unusable (or so annoy users to such an extent that they ditch them at the earliest opportunity).
What truly dumfounds me is that it's not that non technical users haven't complained about this shitty design but rather techies—those who ought to know better (such as HN readers)—have not done so.
Much of this bad design wouldn't have happened if they'd whinged at appropriate times.
On the matter of YouTube volumes being too low, I've had to download some videos with tools like NewPipe when I didn't actually want to keep them solely because I didn't have enough volume in the phone's browser.
Downloading the video allowed me to loaded it into VLC player which allows a gain in excess of 100%.
On some equipment the headphone jack is essentially paralleled with the speaker feed and configured to switch out the speakers when the headphones are plugged in. In this configuration the level for normal headphones use is way too high. If the volume is still set to the level that's normally OK for the speakers when the headphones' plug is inserted then that level is likely to be sufficiently high to damage the headphones (and one's hearing).
The opposite also happens, some weeks ago I got fed up with the really crappy sound of my Samsung TV so I thought I'd plug in some better quality speakers as I've done previously with other TV sets only to find that it was genuine headphone outlet, the volume was so low I could hear almost nothing.
It's a nuisance that manufacturers don't make that distinction clear with better labelling.
But of course not to play or compare virtual pianos.
Have you listened to the current 16 inch macbook pro?
I think modern apple laptops can compare themselves in audio quality to any laptop from the past.
What I should have said is that whilst the electrical signal from the DAC is usually excellent (far better than almost any analog-only system), it's interface with the acoustic world (the speakers and their acoustic environment, baffling, enclosures etc.) is mostly terrible and at best only a poor compromise.
It simply isn't possible with traditional speaker technology to provide an optimal environment inside a laptop. If it were then speaker manufacturers would have miniaturized their huge enclosures years ago.
My complaint is that most laptop manufacturers don't even try to work within those restrictive bounds and that makes things much worse.
The matter of having insufficient gain has little or nothing to do with the actual quality of the signal coming from the audio amplifier output, again it's usually quite excellent if one connects to headphones or to an external HiFi system.
____
BTW, I never said laptops had good audio (acoustic sound as opposed to electrical output). As far as I'm concerned their acoustics are all lousy when compared with a decent HiFi system.
Sorry, I wrongly assumed that all readers were skilled in electronics and thus would have made a clear distinction between the quality of the audio signal within the electronics and that which actually emanates from the speakers. In fact, the electrical audio signals are nearly always several orders of magnitude better than what speakers can actually reproduce.
Electronics people usually take that for granted.
Whether this is true of laptops that aren't 15/16" MBPs is a different question.
Does it sound as good as wooden cabinet speaker? Obviously it doesn't. But it sounds better than AM radio is able to, presuming the audio file is of high enough bitrate.
Highly recommended.
However, the feel (the touch) of a grand piano is still miles ahead of modern full fledged electric pianos, and I would prefer any day to play on a grand piano than an electric with all its gimmicks.
Also, try the action of a Kawai MP11 or MP11SE: it’s very close to a grand piano. Yamaha also has a great action but only in high end cabinet pianos, not in cheaper stage ones.
Digitals will always be outclassed by a regularly-tuned decent quality acoustic that is well-placed in a room with decent acoustic characteristics, sure. However, modern higher-end digitals raise the bar quite a lot that, in my opinion, it makes the value proposition of, say, a Yahama U1 a little more questionable for the vast majority of people who aren't professionals or aren't able to set up an optimal acoustic environment at home.
(Worth also mentioning, the key actions on higher-end modern digitals are also pretty damn good these days. My CA79 does a pretty good job at allowing me to play a light legato, and I felt like that experience was quite transferable to some pretty nice Yamaha and Kawai grands I was recently able to play around with. Now, I'm pretty sure I may begin to notice the limits when I start working through level 9/10 (or beyond) pieces in a few years, but that's the point that I'll know it's time to buy a home and put in a grand piano.)
But as far as they have come, for being immersed in always evolving sound and full expression I still prefer my early 80s Disklavier Yamaha U3 by a long margin. It’s a Japanese marvel of engineering - great acoustic sound, loads of solenoids inside it for self playing, early midi implementation and still looks brand new. I don’t know many electronic things I can buy today that will still be relevant and enjoyable 40 years from now. It wasn’t super expensive, around £4K, one of my most enjoyable purchases ever.
The kids are learning on it now too and I think it will still be playable and retain its value for a long time.
While it does take up some space it’s not huge like a grand, but If I moved to a larger house would love get a Yamaha grand.
Having said that, for production work I sometimes use sampled pianos - in a busy mix they sound the same and I don’t have to mic up the piano.
https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq
Audio demos: https://www.modartt.com/pianoteq?tab=instruments
Attention however must be paid to how the piano is listened to. Expecting the bass depth and resonance of a grand piano from a pair of nearfield speakers is clearly out of question, as would be expecting the same feeling only a keyboard physically attached to the instrument can give. Still, one can obtain a sound that is really really close to the real one at a fraction of a fraction of the cost, and space.
Sounds and feels much better than the rough old Steinway I play occasionally. Admittedly it cannot compete with the perfectly maintained and positioned Yamaha c7 I also sometimes get to play.
You should be able to pick one up used for 1700.
The newest highest end Rolands (cabinet models not stage pianos like the rd) have noticeably improved modeling and actions, but not worth 7x the price.
Going the other way you can probably find a used Casio Privia px 160 for $170 that has a playable action and hook up pianoteq
I've bought a few $1500-2000 digital pianos (Kawai ES8, Yamaha P515). The action limits tend to show up when you have to play "in" on the black notes. There just isn't enough leverage to allow that to happen the way it does on a grand. Playing something like Bach in F# or G# is not really possible.
In comparison: https://kawaius.com/technology/wooden-key-actions/
I usually play with headphones and if you invest in good ones you will get quite a pleasing quality.
This. I am a full-time collaborative pianist. Playing on all kinds on instruments comes with the territory. Most grands at venues are poorly maintained. No attention to regulation on the action even if they’re occasionally tuned. But my well-attended-to Steinway B that I spend three hours a day on at home can’t be compared to any of the digital keyboards that are in circulation now. That they have faithfully rendered acoustical samples is fabulous but the poor reproduction of the sound in 3 dimensional space detracts significantly. The ‘B’ that I play resonates over nearly 7 feet in length. Maybe that problem could be solved with speaker placement in the digital world. But the action on digitals is just not solved problem yet. Compared to the average upright or poorly maintained grand, close - even superior. Compared to a fine well-regulated grand action, there’s more work to do.
All of that said, I’m glad the digital keyboards exist, and the innovation is welcome especially if it opens up piano playing to a wider range of home musicians and kids.
Add a $15k studio monitor system to a $10k sampled weighted-action piano and it's going to sound pretty decent.
Actions are getting better all the time - although manufacturers are worried about competing with their own premium products so they tend to cap the action quality on electronic ranges.
And for comparison, modern $10-15k baby grand acoustics tend to sound a bit crap too. You get all the non-linearities of a shorter string length with a so-so action. And they're rarely kept in tune and maintained properly.
Quick search says model B is almost 100k
https://bradfieldpiano.com/steinway-piano-cost/#:~:text=Mode....
Assuming this includes acoustic room treatment (which is at least as, and usually more important than, speakers let alone amplifier) this still sounds quite steep. As in: I've listened to ~$5k systems with some DIY room treatment which are essentially of such high level that most people out there have no idea this is even possible at home, and of which the difference with any system 3 times the price is going to be tiny if not indistinguishable. But anyway: what did you have in mind? I'm talking general music listening, maybe someting for a piano is completely different?
But despite all this, it’s far better than any digital piano because it still fills the room with beautiful sound. And the playing the with slight inconsistencies of the action is part of learning the particular instrument. Though I’m sure this would be annoying to a concert pianist who has to learn the idiosyncrasies on demand, but nonetheless the action feels more delicate and responsive than any electric piano I’ve played. Also ivory keys are superior to plastic in their cold hard tactility.
Fully worth it if you like to play and you have the space. The price of a relatively new and workable condition grand piano is similar to a very good digital one.
> https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/164358912741 1990s - 9k GBP
Very old ones tend to be cheaper:
> https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/284979656880 1890s - 4k GBP
Most digital pianos I've tried (to be fair, not so many) didn't even come close to the action of a real piano. This was even the case for upper mid range instruments (10k).
What I'd like was a digital piano that was as configurable in its response/action as Pianoteq is on the acoustic model parameters. How hard can it be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcC4Thug-h8
Whenever your hand goes "in", there isn't enough leverage to play the black keys, leading to complete misses. On a few grand pianos, no problem.
I ended up returning the ES8 for that reason.
It comes with lovely acoustic piano sounds. The key action feels good to play. It has audio out for headphones, recording, or PA. It's portable, and doesn't need to be tuned. For many/most people, the compromise (and advantages) compared to a real piano is worth it.
That said, one day I dream of living in a house with a real piano. And an upright bass and a drum set.
i don't bother micing up my piano if i'm recording something electronic, but the difference is absolutely there especially for classical performances where dynamics are super important. for fun, me and a couple buddies recorded on a real c7 and keyscape's, same thing, and we all preferred the real mccoy blind tested every time.
Even if you're able to spend obscene amounts of money on a fantastic grand, who wants to do that if there's no way to maintain it?
casual indifference, disrespect and basically stupid accounting on your part
These days, most people haven't the patience to acquire hands-on skills to that depth.
And then there is the general demise of playing instruments (including guitar) or performing music at all. Fewer people even sing today, and singing has the lowest barrier to entry of anything.
And then there is the rise of electronic music.
Really I think anything to do with manufacturing difficulty or things being too expensive is completely a side show compared to the general loss of popularity of piano and instruments in general.
I took 3-4 years of piano but then eventually switched to guitar. At one point I rented an acoustic but I was generally stuck with digital. My digital piano was more expensive than any guitar I've owned, but it still felt like an artificial instrument compared to the acoustic piano whereas all the guitars feel like the real thing. Could just be me though, my learning curve was much steeper on guitar but in the end I took to it more and enjoy it more. But the entry point for very high quality instruments being so much less expensive and the easy maintenance of a guitar versus a piano and the portability difference was obviously a significant thing. There's still a ridiculous amount of nuance and connection with any analog instrument. Acoustic pianos and string instruments have it in a way that's still challenging for anything digital.
I think that's very true and I reckon that's because the guitar is easily/quickly learned—that is to learn and play badly.
If your learning curve was much steeper with the guitar than the piano then your expectations must have been to play it properly (and that could be because of your piano experience).
I learned the piano for while and later gave up on the guitar because I found it too difficult to play every note on it as one does on a piano. Strumming a guitar and playing chords suits many and that's fine but I wanted to do what the likes of Segovia and John Williams do and that was pretty much beyond me.
So I sympathize with your steep learning curve.
Of those, as you've rightly pointed out, at least one more remains. What about Story & Clark? Astin-Weight?
Astin-Weight seems to have quietly gone out of business, see for example their Yelp page:
https://www.yelp.com/biz/astin-weight-piano-mfg-salt-lake-ct...
Story and Clark now apparently outsources their manufacturing:
https://www.pianobuyer.com/story-clark
This is a pretty common scenario. For example, Baldwin used to be a huge piano American manufacturer, and there are plenty of used American-made Baldwin uprights still around. They still make pianos, but as of 2008 they have outsourced all of their manufacturing to Asia.
https://www.pianobuyer.com/baldwin
Companies like Steinway and Mason & Hamlin also have similar arrangements, but only for their lower-end pianos.
In other words: there were fewer lazy, low-effort distractions, so people had to develop more skills, more frequently.
#1 is generally correlated with increased mental health, something which makes sense when you recognize that we are a social animal.
#2 would make for some interesting research
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI_Oe-jtgdI
"We've surely got trouble! Right here in River City. Right here!"
While it's surely a blip and not a trend, there's a shortage of band instruments right now. I just donated my student flute to a nearby music store, and they said they had 40 kids on the waiting list for flutes. The Elkhart brands still exist, but a lot of instruments are made in China.
I think people are still interested in music, but electronics have taken over. Today even electric guitars are in decline.
In the price range that I was comfortable with (a bit less than half of American made), the options were Japanese or Eastern European. Still very fine pianos. The next step down in price from there would be Chinese/Indonesian.
It's fair to say that buying a Steinway concert grand in the midwest would be cheaper than the world's cheapest piano plus a room to house it in tough housing markets :)
If you have 20 dollars, you can find yourself something that makes sounds. If you have 2 million dollars sitting around, I bet these sounded some amount better:
https://news.softpedia.com/news/Transmission-Audio-039-s-Ult...
Those were 2009 dollars.
https://parttimeaudiophile.com/2020/12/06/the-best-cables-po...
My favorite recent discovery was a device that shaves a bit of plastic off the edge of your CDs to improve the sound quality. The manufacturer makes lots of claims about it improving how the light interacts with the polycarbonate, none of which makes any sense. But we don't need a materials scientist or a physicist to explain why their science is bunk, we can just make a hash of the CD before and after "shaving" it to see that the data is still identical.
My "Computer speakers" are a bit crazy, but all together cost me sub $3k for a Neumann nearfield monitor + sub + DAC combo.