Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards Yamaha AvantGrand N2 vs. similar priced Yamaha upright?

Poor fellow...didn't even give him a decent bench either...they should be fully ashamed of themselves.

It'll take him weeks to get that awful experience out of his head.

He'd have been better off with a decent digital piano, and miles ahead with an Avant Grand or a Roland HP-307....either way, he'd would have actually enjoyed playing, instead of that forced performance on that awful upright.

Snazzy

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It is worth reading the comments included with that Youtube video. Seems to support the Acoustic Grands are better than Uprights argument. (Although it really seems absurd to have to be making the argument).

I really had a giggle, though, at snazzy's humour . . . . !

They aren't...but they still don't have the response of a grand piano.

Disgusting.

Just think of how good his performance would have been on a real piano.

He'll need extensive therapy after that experience.

Snazzy

Don't forget that the real grand action will need regulating often to keep it up to your high standards.

Also, as I have already mentioned the biggest cost will be massive depreciation.

Are you implying that upright action never needs to be regulated at all? It shouldn't be any different or more often than upright regulation. And not often as in twice a year tuning. Maybe once every few years, if you play a lot, and only if problems arise. At least the N2 never needs to be voiced and tuned.


And I've also already mentioned that I would worry more about depreciation of acoustic uprights even today than depreciation of the N2 5 years from now. I don't even know why you feel the need to keep beating on this dead horse when we've already killed it several posts ago. It's simpler to just agree to disagree at this point.

I agree...the basic topic is a dead horse. This always happens when an acoustic piano aficionado strays onto the forum. We are here because we like DPs/keyboards/synths etc. It's just a waste of everybody's time for someone to preach about their OPINION of the superiority of certain acoustic pianos.

If I could get myself an AG I would be very very happy to have it. I would not cross the street to own ANY upright piano. No one is going to persuade me otherwise and I dare say I will not persuade certain individuals of what I consider to be the superiority of the AG to ANY upright piano.

However, the idea that the upright piano is as worthy and valid and relevant as a grand piano is laughable. The upright was born out of a need to emulate a real (grand) piano but at much lower cost and with a much smaller footprint. Those people that link to the odd YouTube vid where a decent musician gets a decent tune out of an upright: well done, very convincing. Now show me a video of Horowitz or Agerich or Ashkenazy or Billy Joel or Elton John or Diana Krall or indeed any top notch piano player playing an upright by choice.

The philosophical argument about Digital v Acoustic can rage on for years to come. But surely no one is seriously saying an upright piano has a future? Grands yes for another generation at least, but uprights are already dead in the water.

Steve

You are joking aren't you Steve?

As far as I was aware this is a public forum where anyone is free to comment.

By the way, I am not an 'acoustic' piano aficionado. I am simply a pianist and a piano teacher who has a lot of experience with both acoustic and digital instruments. The OP asked for opinions on the N2 vs a Yamaha upright and I happen to have spent time with both these pianos. I offered my opinion which I am entitled to thanks very much.

If you guys want to waste your money on an N2 then good luck to you. You can impress your mates and bang on about its 'grand piano action'. Unfortunately what you will have is not a grand piano, it's just an expensive digital which will be obsolete far sooner than any acoustic upright.

It's clear that none of you are prepared to listen to any opinions that differ with your own in which case I will leave you to play nicely on your forum.

On this forum, some have paid a little over $8,000 (to $10,000) for the AGN2. The last time I was looking, I didn't find an upright that I liked for that amount. Basically, I'd prefer a good acoustic grand first, of course, Chris you're right about that. But my experience with Boston grands makes me hesitant. Where I take lessons, they bought four brand new Bostons grands about five years ago. Only one of them sounds good to me and all of them get routinely tuned. Two of them sound very bright and not as good at all as my 990 (with headphones admittedly). How do I know what I'm going to get when I buy an acoustic grand which would have to be at the lower end for double what I have to pay for the AGN2? So I'm very interested in an excellent digital with good touch and if it gives me the feel of a good grand, so much the better.

Wow.... that's many pages with lots of opinions.. I'll try to find a store with an N2 AvantGrand. Again, my problem with the digitals so far (though mostly top level stage pianos), is that I can't find a connection with the instrument. It's soo unsatisfying. I'm no classical concert pianist. Mostly jazz stuff, and some classical on the side to maintain and improve technique.
All this talk about key action and sound. The thing is, they have to be connected, and there has to be a sense of life and detail to the sound when playing. Most digitals sound rather dead to me. But hopefully this AvantGrand series is better..
We'll see..
I agree with the upright comments, but I much prefer practicing on an good upright to a Yamaha CP300, Roland RD700GX, Kawai MP9500 (ok, this one is better than the others, but no cigar) etc.. Haven't had too much experience with Clavinovas. Have tried them out in stores, and wasn't too impressed...

One thing I think Yamaha should do with the N2/N3 is to allow the digital 'guts' of the piano to be swappable, so if in the future an N12/N13 comes out with much improved samples/synthesis one could keep the N2/N3 action/cabinet/speakers and just upgrade the sound engine.

Of course Yamaha would prefer to sell a new 10k+ piano rather than a 2k+ sound expansion card, but then again if these were available a lot more N2/N3 owners would upgrade to those than sell their N2/N3 to buy a newer one!

They did. That is what MIDI and Line-In are for.


But I know what you are saying. it would be good if the sound were in a self contained box that could be swapped out. But I think Yamaha would rather (1) Not point out to potential buyers that the current technology will become obsolete and (2) they want to sell you a new piano when it does.

Better yet, why can't Yamaha just build it right in the first place? Why they refuse to put a couple of hundred dollars of computer into something that costs >$10k is beyond me.

This is one of the big reasons I dislike high-end cabinetry DPs, the guts never live up to the promise of the outer trappings.

does the avant grand transmit variable 'soft' pedal information over midi? or only on/off? can you have TRS availability while playing, say, pianoteq via MIDI/line-in or would you have to disable TRS entirely otherwise?



because it doesn't make any business sense to do so? If you can keep selling incremental improvements every few years for full price, why would you try to get to the complete bleeding edge knowing that for 10 years or more you wouldn't be able to really provide any sort of meaningful upgrade?

On the other hand I do think that for the price premium an N2/N3 commands, they ought to have been made state-of-the-art even in terms of synthesis, because part of this price premium is the 'once a person buys this it's unlikely they'll buy another DP for a long, long time'.

I can think of one or two exceptions! Chopin used an upright Pleyel at various times. Rachmaninov's early recordings were on an upright, he had one in his touring railway carriage, and specified 'a small upright' as an alternative to one of the harps in the 3rd Symphony. Gershwin composed most of Rhapsody in Blue on an upright, and Glenn Gould developed his early technique on one. These choices were likely dictated by circumstance or convenience (they obviously used grands for public solo performances), but Jacques Durand intriguingly notes that Debussy 'was very fond of his upright piano, a lovely instrument from which he drew ravishing sounds.'

I also find it curious that a modern concert grand like the Steinway, which only reached its current form late in the 19th century (and is very different from the pianos that many of the greatest works were actually composed for) is so often seen as the only instrument 'worthy' of the standard repertoire, or of emulation on a DP (at least without external sample libraries). How about chucking out the dreadful simulated choir and string sounds that every DP seems plagued with, and giving us some decent uprights, fortepianos, Broadwoods or Pleyels to supplement 'Grand Piano 1'?

Yeah, but I've never seen anything like this. The DP industry is so far behind the technology curve that it's joke. Maybe PCs caught them with their pants down, but how long do we have to wait for them to finally wake up?

Meanwhile we're reduced to cobbling together random keyboards and decent PC-based piano sounds on our own to fill the void. It's sad.

Too right! Perhaps a few really good harpsichords as well.

I don't believe this will ever happen in the classical world, at least for the purposes of public performance (practice is another matter). The Berlin Philharmonic could replace their timpani with a drum machine tomorrow, but they aren't going to. What would be the point? Audiences want authenticity (hence the popularity of the 'historic performance'/'original instrument' style, where Mozart concertos are played on a fortepiano accompanied by gut-strung violins tuned to a period pitch). For rock/pop, of course, all bets are off.




The similarity that strikes me is between the way dSLRs are discussed on photography forums, and the way DPs are sometimes talked about here. Over on places like dpreview, there are endless threads discussing the relative merits of different cameras with respect to pixel density, noise levels, shutter lag, AF speed, chromatic aberration, and build quality. Certain brands and types of camera are seen as superior since they are what the 'professionals' use. Much less space is given to whether all these features are actually necessary for a specific style of photography, or to the mysterious process of using this technology to communicate a particular artistic idea. Sometimes how the camera feels in your hand is more important than the ISO range or the framerate it can deliver, but try suggesting that to someone who thinks a particular dSLR is the only camera worth buying! The typical reaction is enough to make me want to put down the D300 and pick up an 'obsolete' 'analogue' Leica...

Just checked my N2 through Pianoteq. The soft pedal is NOT continuous (you get either 0 or 127). The sustain pedal IS continuous (0 to 127 -- thus: 0, 4, 7, 12, 16, and so on . . . .).

In order to run Pianoteq audio into the N2 line in, you have to turn "Local Control" off. One effect of disabling local control is that you don't get TRS. If, however, you leave local control on, turn down the internal volume, and run Pianoteq through headphones or external speakers, you of course still get TRS.

it would have been nice if it was possible to leave trs on but have local control off to be able to play, say, pianoteq on the internal speakers with trs enabled... thanks for checking the soft pedal, surprised it's still modeled/sent only as on/off