Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Yamaha P-155 sympathetic resonance

I'd buy it, that's why, and you would too. What are we talking here? 1GB of flash, 1GHz processor, a bit of ram, almost nothing these days. You can put it together yourself at newegg. I'm so tired of the table scraps they've been peddling. They're so used to know-nothing parents looking for a deal on a first keyboard they don't know how to make anything real anymore. Sometimes I wonder if they are colluding in keeping our expectations low and their prices artificially high...

The P155 manual says it has "Sustain Samples". You are correct, this isn't the same as pedal down velocity layers (if that is what you meant). But that is better than nothing, particularly when compared to other digital pianos (which isn't saying a lot).


Yes, but only when compared to other digital pianos (which isn't saying a lot).


CP300, RD700sx/gx, MP8 all have looping (so says Purgatory Creek). No way in heck am I laying serious bucks down for inferior technology. PC samplers had it all over these guys like 5+ years ago, who are they kidding? Not me.

You can check if your DP handles "sympathetic resonance"(some manufacturers call it "string resonance") or not.

Without pressing the sustain pedal, press C4(center C) with ppp and then press F3(F which is lower closest to C4) with staccato with strong accent. If you hear the sound of C5(one octave upper than C4) your DP handles sympathetic resonance.

This happens because the 3rd harmonic of F3 is close to the 2nd harmonic of C4.

It hasn't progressed nearly as fast as the PC sampler / emulator market. No disrespect, but what do the engineers DO all day at Kawai? Sit around designing the next micro-incremental advance in digital pianos by adding/removing a button here and there? Look at ancient PC samplers and say "we could do that"?

My prayers were answered years ago with PC samplers / emulators. I just want someone to put it in a rackmount / keyboard. Is that seriously too much to ask?

This board is full of people who are quite interested in these details, otherwise it probably would not exist. Also, leaders lead, they don't sit around following blind consumers and their idiot expectations, they are busy dreaming up and implementing the next big thing.

Please excuse my rudeness, my hair would be on fire 24/7 if I were able to work at Kawai (or Yamaha, Roland, Korg, etc.).

It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...

I learned guitar on a very lame Harmony that had rather serious intonation problems - there was really no way to tune it correctly. It was a serious impediment to my musical education and enjoyment. The first instrument can make or break an interest in a whole area of interest of one's life.

[edit] If you're talking Casio CDP-100 as as low a one should go, I'd agree. But many of my wife's students play on crap toys, and it is often impossible to get their parents to upgrade once they have made the initial investment (however small). Everyone suffers as a result.

I've been thinking lately, I'm a computer engineering student so how hard would it be to design something like this on an FPGA? We could keep it simple at first, and just use a single piano sample, off some flash. it looks like the memory involved would be pretty cheap. I have quite a few ideas about simplifying the system, especially if I can give myself some ridiculous polyphony (704 polyphony, or 8*88, would make me happy).

I have concerns with hardware costs and how much processing power I'd need, i'm especially doubtful that a cheap FPGA could pull it off. nonetheless, I like it!

I think I have a senior design idea.....

I learned on VHDL but switched to Verilog for a big project a couple of years ago - I highly recommend Verilog (less verbose, etc.). Do your project on a Xilinx Spartan3 demo board (can be had for <$200, has flash, DRAM, LCD, AD/DA, RS232, VGA, etc.). I use the simulator in Altera's Quartus tool (very nice). Not sure if FPGAs are the way to go for a full-blown commercial synth, but the smaller ones are showing up in all kinds of things lately. Most now have hardware multipliers / DSP sections associated with 1/2 or more of the block RAMs.

I really love digital design, it is much more creative than I ever thought it would be (I was an analog hobbyist in my youth)! Look at www.opencores.org & anywhere else you can find ideas.

For this kind of thing you will probably end up needing to understand DRAM interfaces (complex) and the DSP blocks.

You can really differentiate yourself from the other EE coders by making FPGAs your thing, it is a niche job that requires a special skill set. It is true digital design. I enjoy working with both the board guys and the C coders, and I never really have to get my hands too dirty or worry about external deadlines too much.

If I were an EE in the synth / digital piano department of Korg, Yamaha, Roland, KAWAI, whatever (drool, drool) I don't know if I'd be able to get out of bed in the morning and hold my head up after having my ass repeatedly kicked by cheap PC software / hardware for the last decade or so. Don't those guys have any self-respect? How do they show up for work every day and manage turn on their PC, knowing that it pwned almost their entire product line years ago?

Sympathetic (or string) resonance is the simulation (be it sampled or modeled) of undamped strings being excited by other strings, due to harmonics as mezzo-poor points out.


I guess I am a bit confused. I (mistakenly?) thought the intent of your post was to gather opinions on the realism of DP's for recommendations for students. Perhaps it's more of a discussion on the state of the art and/or price and demand.
PC ROMplers are a far cry from a quality stand alone final product which offers musicians a viable alternative to an acoustic piano.
Inferior technology?? Hardly!!

Well, that's monopoly (or duopoly) capitalism for you. Yamaha brings out a DP with 3 layers, Casio follows suit. Yamaha upgrades to 4 layers (P-155), Casio will follow suit. Etc. There aren't many improvements to the hardware per se, so instead they play the incremental update game. This may also be due to manufacturers considering DPs a more or less finished product, so the R&D budgets are probably not that big anymore, except for developments like the V-Piano or AvantGrand.

If you created a startup company and developed something much, much better, Yamaha and Casio would probably buy you out. Ideally they would integrate the technology into their own DPs (that's how half of Apple's products seem to have begun), or perhaps they would simply bury it (more likely).



I was mainly referring to people buying some random weighted Casio or Yamaha, and how they can't really go completely wrong with that (for a beginner). Of course there are also quite a bit of no-name trash keyboards...

Sorry, I got worked up and hijacked my own thread!

Well, digital pianos are not nearly state-of-the-art when it comes to the electronic guts. Treating sample memory like it is some kind of precious commodity is so 1980's. And fairly snappy processors are a dime a dozen these days. You throw out what could be the brains of a very good digital piano every time you upgrade your cell phone.

I think DP manufacturers are playing the same game PC "manufacturers" like Dell, HP, etc. are playing. Any feature not immediately obvious to the average Joe consumer is designed out. This is why I build my own PCs.

LOL!! Hopefully you didn't offend the OP!!

Yeah, it's definitely the marketing smoke and mirrors game aimed at the not so electronically savvy musician or parent.

We are definitely stuck with either being spoon fed, or forking out ridiculous $$. (or starting your own business).

As well as a bunch of name-brand trash keyboards - my wife has to play on an older ~$500 "toy" Yamaha at church, poor thing. I installed their PA, and every chance I get I tell them they really need something better, but it seems they already crossed that bridge and don't really want to discuss it further.

Same thing with most of the parents of her students, can't get them to upgrade from a terribly insufficient toy to save their lives, even if it is obviously holding the student back. They spend so much on lessons, the price of a decent (as they go) DP is nothing in comparison. Sometimes I fantasize going the "cold, dead hands" route :-).

Or not buying for a while until things catch up, that's the route I'm taking. Meanwhile, my wife needs recommendations from the current lame crop of DPs, and I have to hold my nose while perusing the stone knives and bearskins that pass for such.

I had an email exchange with someone at Pianoteq a year or more ago. In the process of begging for a teacher's discount (which they offer BTW) I begged the guy to put something like it in a box or board, but he said they weren't interested. Now that they have a Linux port I wonder if rolling your own box wouldn't be so difficult.

UPDATE:

I sent another email to Yamaha asking several questions about the sampling on the P-155. Got a call on the answering machine a couple of minutes ago from a guy named "Lewis" who proceeded to hem and haw his way through not answering any of them - and then he was cut off by our machine.

Lewis claimed that the engineers don't divulge how they do the sampling on the P-155 (lord, like sampling is some huge trade secret) but he did say that he didn't think all the keys were sampled (i.e. there is some stretching of samples across multiple keys) which is pretty much the opposite of what my first email from Yamaha seems to state.

The feeling I get about this is that Yamaha doesn't want to go on record with any technical info not in the brochure or user's manual (which is pretty slim pickens IMO). They make a big deal about the number of multi-samples, but they won't discuss looping or stretching, issues which are arguably as important. I guess I'll just have to find one in a store and check out the looping / stretching myself <sigh>.

Anyone from Yamaha out there that could comment on this? I want to know, definitively, the following:
1. Is every key individually sampled (i.e. no sample stretching)?
2. How many velocity layers (I assume 4)?
3. Are there pedal up and pedal down velocity layers, or what?
4. Is looping employed?
5. Is the sympathetic resonance a single sample? If not, what is it?

Is this too much to ask? This kind of info is readily available for any PC sample set as it is critical to judging the sample set quality. I don't see DPs as any different.

1. i don't think that every key is sampled on current Yamaha DPs, low or high end (except perhaps n2/n3). i remember some people talked about it a while ago on this forum.
2. P155 has 4 level dynamic sampling, i.e. velocity layers.

5. no idea. but P155 definitely doesn't have it, while CP300/P250/PF500/CLP380 all have it.

OK, that right there tells me I'm not interested in the P-155 as a replacement for our P-120. I'll just keep waiting I guess <sigh>.

Thanks!

I believe Yamaha samples about every third piano key, while Roland actually does sample every single key. It might be that the higher-end Clavinovas are also sampled key-for-key.

However, I still prefer the sound of a Yamaha over a Roland for some reason. It's also about the quality, not just quantity of samples used. Fewer sampled keys means a longer time before looping sets in (if one assumes the same memory footprint), which is presumably why Yamaha still does sample stretching.

I think all DP manufacturers have put a lot of time and money into making the samples for their keyboards, and they are reluctant to just dump them in these days of $1 GB ROM.

Sucks to be them - I'm tired of their ancient crap and refuse to buy any more of it until it is less than a decade behind current technology.