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I'm wondering how much of the cost of the V-piano is due to all the tuning,regulation,voicing options that are there? And would it be a V-piano without these?

I want the V-piano for its touch and sound and it has enough presets to make me happy. I wouldn't use all the regulation options.

Was the piano made for and being sold to a niche, buyer subset, specialized market, but just picking up garden variety pianists as a collateral benefit?

Is it like the super fancy auto prototypes that come out at car shows, but aren't sold to the public?

Or was the whole modeling process so expensive that they had to add in something else (regulation) to make the V unique and justify the price?

Would it be the same without the regulation options or in some magical way does it only sound and feel the way it does because being modeled means it is an "imaginary, artifical, magic" piano that HAS to have imaginary strings, hammers, and felts that can be adjusted?

Obviously I have no clue as to how any digital/modeled piano actually works, but many of you do, so what do you think?

I think it's just a case of being the only hardware player in that game currently. As soon as another company competes, the price will drop in half. Or perhaps if they don't sell enough units, the price will drop. I remember walking into Best Buy and seeing a plasma television for the first time and it was $20,000. A better plasma is now $1000. The V-piano reminds me of that. It's cool, but I'll wait.

Would you still want it if you couldn't tune it, change the hammers, strings, etc...?

I believe that the V-piano is a lot about demonstrating technological leadership. I do not even think that Roland believes that they can sell many V-pianos at this time. They will view this as an investment for the future, because with all the hype the device has received people will be glad to buy parts of this technology in any future DP once it gets cheaper. Also, people always connect quality to the price, so this new technology has to be expensive in the beginning to make a strong statement about its quality.

I'm going to get my self a v-piano.

In 5 more years

I'd like to see more flexibility and sounds added--not less. In any case, most of that is probably done in software, so I'm not sure that cutting it out would really affect the price that much.

The V-Piano is basically a prototype that's on sale. When the technology matures a little it will get better, cheaper and more reliable and won't give up any capabilities. That's been the case with every electronic device for the last 60 years. I see no reason why this one should be any different.

creating an interface for an software engine that can simulate a true piano, is the easiest part because the mathematical and software models behind this technology already has all of those parameters defined and ready to tweak. Then I don't think it will make any difference.

I think the real challenge for V-Piano designers was the response time of the system. Every company can model a true piano, it is not so hard, but when you want a model with a very fast response time that the player don't feel any delay, it became really hard. Then as a designer, you have no choice to use as much as possible parallel/embedded processing. Then I think most of the money is going to the hardware, I am not sure, but I think it is mostly based on DSPs. In ideal, they should have a separate DSP for each string. Then the output should be applied to a Cabinet Model, and you will hear the result after decoding, amplifying, etc.

The cost of any such products are almost all in the R&D. The manufacturing and distribution cost of something like Pianoteq software is something less than a dollar. By that I mean when you buy it, you download it from their website, which cost maybe a dollar to pay for the bandwidth it takes to push the bits to you. Of course, Pianoteq cost 249 Euros. The beauty of software of course is if they expect to sell X copies and end up selling 2X copies, the additional X cost nothing to make unlike the V-Piano.

To answer your question, the extra options that you have no interest in are basically additional software that cost essentiall nothing more to make, so you might as well take it. The manufacturing cost of the V-Piano is not that much (in the hundreds of dollars, if the manufacturing plant isn't new and already depreciated in the books), but much of the cost has to pay for all the engineers and designers spending thousands of hours @ ($50-$100/hour) when they were working on the project. Ten engineers cost on average $1 to $2 million a year on projects. Most companies would take this cost then figure how many they could sell in say 3 years, then derive a product price. My guess is that Roland would barely break even with the V-Piano. They subsidize these high-end efforts by selling a lot of other products that had paid for themselves many times over. These high-end products are necessary for any company to work out issues before moving the technology down to mid and entry level product lines.

I personally work on a computer line that sell for around $50,000 per unit. However, the technology is heavily borrowed from our $500,000 computer line. Other engineers are working hard to move our technology down to the $5,000 computer lines, and eventually the PC people may some day inherite the technology for their $500 PC.

It is so important to push the envelope in product development and hopefully comes up with products that would be high end without leaving yourself with no market. Once every few years, the government place orders for super-computers and sometimes they have $30 to $50 million budgets. Since we could only sell 2 or 3 of those every few years, they cost what they cost, and we don't actually make money. It's more for bragging rights than anything else when you were chosen by the NOAA or NASA. When the government do not allow us to disclose we were their choice (more secretive part of the government), some time we don't even enter the bidding process as there is no money in it.

In the way, the V-Piano and the Avant-Grand are probably not expected to make a great deal of profit if at all but as proof of concept products. If the products succeed, they lead to mid and entry level products that do make a lot of profit down the road which they do sell hundreds of thousands of units and make lots of money. If V-Piano or Avant-Grand flops, it's becomes part of any large corporations' R&D budget.

Actually the cost of selling software online doesn't depend on bandwidth, which is basically free with all serious hosting providers (unless you're selling huge videos). Hosting is a fixed cost per month. But the payment gateway and credit card companies take maybe 0.25$ + 1-2% of the total amount of each purchase. And of course, there's this thing called VAT.

Otherwise totally agree.

The cheap distribution of software is what makes open source software work. Actually, if I knew more about sound engineering, I would certainly be working on an open source Pianoteq-like clone right now, it'd be tons of fun. Maybe you could offload some of the computations to the parallel processor on the video card.

Very good information in your post, 4evrBeginR.

One thing I think prospective buyers of an instrument such as the V-Piano might want to consider...

A proof of concept product such as the V-Piano will tend to "pull out all stops" and put everything the company is currently capable of doing with that technology into that initial product. As the company determines what the intended market is interested in, part of the cost-cutting is to not include those rather esoteric features that the original "concept product" included. If people are not interested in, say, all manner of adjustable strings and hammers, then maybe that won't be included in the lower cost versions of the product, with those features possibly being replaced by something else that customers would want.

Therefore, for somebody who does want that sort of feature, maybe the V-Piano is the one to buy, and for others who want the modelling but not all the associated bells and whistles, maybe the "consumer" follow-on models are worth waiting for.

Tony

The V piano is on sale for nearly $1,000 off at GC, half of which I'd lose by paying tax in CA, and I'm waiting to hear if they'll give me what I paid for my 635 or close to it since I got a really good deal.

I'm seriously thinking of taking the plunge for the sale, which only goes till tomorrow.

It's halfway to what I said I'd by the V for, which was $4,000.