Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards DP with wooden keys?

Have you ever bought plastic? Plastics of equivalent materioal properties cost maybe three times the price of wood.

Plastic doesn't grow on trees. It's expensive. But then you can make complex shapes quickly and it's less labor intensive to work with.

Even cheap polyester goes for over $20 per gallon at the local hardware store. Raw epoxy is $100. The carbon, kevlar or glass fibers are not cheap and require time and skill to place into molds. This does not count the enginerring time. Wood parts can be cut out on CNC machines very inexpensively.

I was a CNC operator (3-axis vertical mill) for several years, and a CNC programmer after that. I would imagine that the setup and manufacture of wood keys, piece by piece on a CNC, even thought the speeds and feeds could be pretty fast, would lose on an economic basis when compared to injection molded plastic parts, even with relatively small lots, and even though the raw materials cost more. The wood would also need to be rather carefully selected, a QC nightmare compared to plastic resin.

Plastic however is non-renewable, a very good reason not to use it. But that unfortunately is never stopped by the power of capitalist economics.

Isn't it something that Kawai (in my subjective, biased opinion, one of the most innovative and artistically-minded piano manufacturers in the world) has had the guts to introduce the Millenium III action with its revolutionary carbon-fiber components in its best acoustic pianos while it remains adamant about using traditional, spruce keyboard levers on its best digital pianos? That, alone, speaks for itself.

Most famous world-class pianists, particularly classical, consistently shun digital pianos as we know them. Just try and hire a famous, world-class concert pianist to perform publicly on a DP, and find out whether that could ever be possible. Now why is that? Know any famous clarinet player who will perform publicly using and ABS instrument? Any organist who'll play Bach in concert on an electronic organ, even a digital one? I guess high-level musicians are not too keen on trashing everything traditional just because it's traditional...

There must be some middle road between prefering analog recordings to digital ones or finding an audible difference between grades of audio cables, and systematically throwing away anything traditional without first making sure whether some of the traditions might not happen to insure the safeguard of certain measurable, scientific and artistically defendable advantages inherent to "traditional" musical instruments. This is not the same as arguing that vacuum tubes sound warmer and better.

Wooden keyboards address two very different concerns of serious musicians as these try to accept digital pianos as usable, workable alternates to acoustic ones: one is purely psychological and is efficiently addressed by cosmetically simulating wooden keys much like Yamaha does in the NW keyboards; the other stems from a genuine effort to supply the artist with an interface (e.g. long spruce levers) that closely resembles --and feels like!-- the one he's used to on a "real" piano and better supports the sort of "intimate bond" that exists between the advanced pianist and his instrument.

So, Tony Lau, you very appropriately raise the question: is it just tradition, or is it something else? In my humble opinion it is quite definitely something else... and, sorry, some of us will have to agree to disagree.

Regards,

Claude

The use of Carbon fiber in wooden actions, brings to mind the Steinway pianos with the Teflon bits that ran from the 60's to the very early 80's.

It wasn't a good time for Steinway or it's customers.

Carbon Fiber may cause similar issues as wood expands and contracts with humidity, while the former does not.

Snazzy

Steinway's teflon problem arose from their use of teflon inserted into wood. The teflon would come loose when the wood expanded.

I don't think that carbon fiber is being used in that way.

Let's hope they aren't.

Does anyone know where we can see a view of the action?


Snazzy

I think it says that they want to reduce the cost of manufacturing and labor, and also maybe increase the consistency / quality of their pianos. Limiting the use of plastics or composites to items you don't normally see or interact with directly on the piano is undoubtedly the easiest way to not [censored] off / alienate the traditional players.


Classical musicians are a tough crowd. Their entire existence is at this point rather artificial, it being tied to long dead composers, violins made 300 years ago, patron-funded symphonies, etc. Their adherence to tradition is fundamental. I do enjoy a lot of classical music, but rather in spite of all the snooty elitism that comes along with it.


I think it is the intermodulation distortion introduced by the needle movement that some people like. Audiophiles chalk it up to magic or something. Signal processing theory proves that waveforms can be perfectly reconstructed from discrete samples, though many refuse to believe it because it conflicts with their world-view or lifestyle or something.


No, no, that's crazy talk.


I was using the audiophile analogy to demonstrate how markets can become polluted with false believe, pseudo-science, and blind tradition. Consumers in those markets must then contend with products that are to some degree based on those false premises.

I'm all for making a more realistic DP both in sound and in feel. I'm just arguing that that doesn't necessarily require the use of traditional materials to achieve that result.

Using plastic may or may not reduce the cost. Certainly carbon fiber composites can cost a lot more than wood and require more labor to produce. On the other hand many kinds of platic parts are very inexpensive to make.

Every time I've had the option to buy wood parts or carbon parts for sailboats, arrow shaft, racing canoe paddles, you name it. The carbon part was insanely expensive compared to wood. carbon requires a large investment on expensive tools and equipment and a much more highly trained and skilled work force.


Wood, even very high quality spruce is not expensive. I have some. It is easy to buy the UPS guy drops off a box on the door step and that box costs less than the other parts one might put inside a guitar amp. The wood is cheaper then the aluminum used to make a chassis or the G10 fiberglass used to build circuit boards.

Snazzy,

here are a few links which will allow comparing Kawai's Millenium III action with its DP's AWA Grand Pro ones:

http://www.kawaius.com/main_links/grands_09/ABS/absc_7709.html

http://www.kawaius.com/main_links/digital/EMI/awagpII.html

http://www.londonderrypiano.com/awapro.html

http://www.kawaius.com/main_links/abs/abs_1.html

Claude

Perfect only up to the 1/2 of the sampling frequency, and that's assuming perfect D to A conversion.

I am sure there are cables bad enough to cause a difference. For example, I thought there was something wrong with my TV until I found out it was the badly shielded video cable.

Thank you kindly, Claude...I will peruse these later on this evening.

Much appreciate your detective work.

Snazzy

snazzy, this YouTube video shows a close-up of the AWA Grand PRO II action in motion:

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

Cheers,
James
x

Thanks James...pretty cool setup.

I remember some of the earlier Yamaha hammer actions had the hammer striking upwards inside the key.

Snazzy

Here is one reference that is pivotal, I think...

It does show you that carbon fiber action mechanics are indeed vastly superior to their wooden counterparts, but may I stress that even Kawai remains adamant about using wood for the

1- keys;
2- hammer shanks;
3- hammer heads;
4- and, of course, soundboards!

http://www.georgekolasis.com/piano-action-parts.html

Hope you enjoy this article, it's extremely enlightening.

Regards,

Claude

I have a Kawai MP9500 with wood keys, predecesor to the Kawai MP8. Comparing it to my other keyboards with plastic keys, a Yamaha P80, a Kawai MP4, and a Fusion 8HD, I prefer the wood keys on the MP9500. The wood keys are, I think, more shock absorbing than plastic keys. The plastic keys deliver more of a blow to your fingers when bottoming out, while the wood keys absorb some of the blow. Of course, some of this may be the design of the mechanisms. But as a shock absorber, hard plastic is like concrete, transmiting all of the force, while wood expands and contracts to absorb some of the force. Would you rather run in your bare feet on a hard plastic floor, or a wood floor?

I recently completed a PoP (point of purchase) display for the new RM3 Grand wooden key action (the successor to the AWA Grand PRO II). This piece is mounted to a three key sample action and should clearly highlight the similarities between a grand piano action and the latest KAWAI digital piano equivalent.

Cheers,
James
x

Or maybe a soft plastic floor like the one in your bathroom or kitchen made of sheet vinyl? There are billions of kinds of plastics other than the hard variety. You want something hard on top, yes, but I would think a foamed type might work well for the rest of the piano key - similar weight, density, and strength as wood, but with less variation.

advanced, space-age plastics, as proven by Kawai's Millenium III action, add considerably to the cost of production. In complex, small and intricate parts and links, they improve the action considerably and therefore make a lot of sense. In the case of keys, it would only mean trying to imitate what wood has already been doing perfectly for centuries and at a much lower cost. Keyboard levers (the keys) cut from well-seasoned spruce in quality pianos have never been a troublesome part in the whole piano machinery. But tradition must be trashed at any cost, right?

Cheers,

Claude

This discussion reminds me of the metal vs plastic issues in cameras of a couple of decades ago. People had a natural resistance to plastic, not considering that "plastic" means a whole lot of different things. In cameras, the plastics chosen resulted in less friction, more stability, closer machining tolerances, lower cost, better durability, and allowed for a whole new technology level that had been difficult, expensive, or impossible in metal.

Though there are still hold-outs who view plastic as cheap, the simple fact is that many recent innovations in cameras wouldn't have been possible without it.

It's all in the proper choice of plastic, and the correct use.

You've never seen a sticking piano key?