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Comment by EzGraphs | Hacker News Reader

Very sad to me. Digital pianos are a great innovation in many respects but are sort of analogous to microwave ovens in cooking. Work well enough to be widely adopted, but are unlikely ever to be the means of producing a masterpiece.

The relative lack of (touch) sensitivity and the more limited variation in timbre are immediately noticeable. One of the other qualities of a traditional piano that I instantly miss in even the best digital simulations is sympathetic vibration. Holding the sustain pedal down will not simply allow the notes to play longer. Other strings that freed up begin to vibrate as well. It produces an effect that - the last I checked - is not well emulated in a digital environment.

Reflective of the values of our age I guess. Small, relatively portable, low maintenance wins out in many other arenas. Why not music...

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You're talking about keyboards, not digital pianos.

I currently use a Yamaha P155. The keys are weighted and touch-sensitive just like a real piano. Each key has its own recording, with its own timbre, at different volume levels. I can even use a damper pedal which responds to have far down I've pushed it.

It's not exactly the same as a real piano, but as someone who played a real piano for 10 years, it's damned close. It's not like moving from a gas stove to a microwave, it's like moving from a gas stove to an electric stove. Not quite the same, but for nearly all practical purposes, it's good enough -- and wearing headphones in your apartment so your neighbors don't hate you, it just wins.

I have something similar, and I agree -- a quality digital piano is almost as good as the real thing. In some ways better: it never needs tuned, and the gentler touch is easy on the fingers.

I will admit, though, when I want thunder, there's no substitute for real strings.

A was looking into digital pianos recently to see how far along the technology has come. The extent to which they go to try to capture the nuances of a real piano took me by surprise.

You know how when you depress the pedal on a piano (without playing) the dampers lifting from the strings causes them to quietly ring a little bit? They model that now.

You know how if you quietly depress a key to keep a single damper open, and then loudly strike a staccato note in the bass, how the first note resonates with some harmonics from the bass note? They're modeling that now too.

They used to try to save memory by not sampling the entire decay of a note (after some amount of decay, they would start looping a brief sample, playing it little quieter each iteration). Now they sample the entire decay, because memory is cheap enough.

Here are some videos of the one that caught my eye:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdVf-fwCRSE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k77nDTIWkeA

I'm tempted to go try to play some. It would be very nice to not have to pay for periodic tunings.

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