Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Poll (sort of): Will the 'acoustic piano' become a relic?

I have had a grand for 48 years, and a DP for 27 years, as well as a clavichord. They each serve a niche in my playing and performing. With a good grand, you feel the string vibrations through the keys, since the whole physical structure of the acoustic piano participates and contributes to the sound. Being able to respond, not only to the sound of the notes and to the action, but also to the vibrations makes one feel part of the instrument, something that, as far as I know, has not been simulated on a DP (yet). Until it does, my guess is that performers, at least, will demand acoustic pianos.

Say, when pianists play the same Steinway D, for example, Cliburn, Rubinstein, Horowitz, etc., they produce completely different sounds from the very same piano. You might even recognize who is who.

For now, I don't think such a thing is possible with DPs.

It has been done on the Yamaha Avant Grand as of a few years ago.

I think the huge percentage of pianists, including those on this thread who hate the sound of digitals/hybrids, would have difficulty telling the difference in a blind test.

Some time ago a good pianist posted a recording in the Members Recordings forum. Many praised the recording and some began asking about the piano and guessing what piano it was. The recording was done on a digital or hybrid, but no one guessed this.

I don't think it will die out. Not before the end of humanity as we know it, anyway.
Just like the synthesizer did not replace every other instrument, the digital piano will not replace the acoustic piano.

However, I believe that spinets and console pianos might die out eventually. They have poorer action than proper uprights, and therefore no real advantage over digital pianos. Unless you intend to play the piano during the next power outage.

Not if I was sitting in the back of a concert hall.

Yes, I agree that in a space like that digitals are lacking.

I sure do, at least in online postings. After seeing this first part of your post, I was going to mention about how I was fooled by a posted recording, similarly to what you talked about in the next part. I don't think it was the one you referred to, but....it was of Chopin's 1st Etude. I did a detailed reply and then was pretty mad when it turned out that this wasn't "real" playing; not only was it on a digital, but the tempo and dynamics were played with after the fact. There was another thread more recently where apparently the posted recording was a doctored digital. Even after some people said this was obviously what it was, I couldn't tell and had no idea what enabled them to know.


Maybe showing my bigotry about DP's I was very surprised to see this! Through your posts, we know that you're a very serious and very knowledgeable classical piano person, and I wouldn't have expected that you'd be coming from a DP. I guess it also shows how far DP's have come -- farther than I knew, even though I do realize what Debrucey said, that they've been advancing ever more rapidly, even just in the past year.


Besides how what you have in mind might be more possible as DP's continue advancing, I think there could also be recognizable differences from the different creative ways that people use the "settings." (Sorry, I'm sure I'm not using the right term, but I mean the programming and adjusting of the kinds of sounds.)

You wouldn't be surprised to learn that I was quite a bigot about the uselessness of DPs for the discerning classical pianist, until I actually decided to buy one for myself in 2010 - when reality set in, and I realized I was really fed up of not having a piano to practise on at home, and having to rely on doing the circuits of piano showrooms, occasionally hiring a practice room, or playing on decrepit instruments wherever I could find them....

Until then I'd never touched a DP - not even with a barge pole, with garlic around my neck and holy water ready for sprinkling.......

Digitals do not come anywhere close to replicating the sound of an acoustic piano, and if their progress during the last 25 years can be extrapolated forward, they never will. They are interesting and useful instruments in their own right, but completely different. And so I don't believe that the acoustic piano will ever be reduced to a true relic, because the music that was written for it (or its cousins) over 250-300 years is just too damn good; someone will always want to play the piano repertoire, and digitals will never suffice for it.

However, I suppose I can imagine a future in which good composers stop writing for it. Not a likely future, imo, but a possible one.

Disagree. They definitely will reach a point where the differences in sound become very hard to tell, at least in small room settings and when compared to acoustic instruments of the same price point. Moreover, I think we will reach that point within 10 years.

I hasten to add that I don't think that digital pianos will REPLACE acoustic ones, not do I think they should.

I know many piano teachers who will refuse to teach children unless they have an acoustic piano. I find this sad. A good acoustic piano is beyond the budget of many UK households, especially in the current climate. The merits of digital pianos should not be so quickly dismissed.

Hopefully not in our lifetime!

Absolutely no chance, imo. On my scale, if digitals 25 years ago were at 1, and if the situation you describe above is represented by 100, digitals are now at 3. Not happening in 10 years, unless they take a completely new and different technical approach, one that's beyond my current imagination.

Edit: I didn't notice your "same price point" condition. That makes for an uninteresting comparison. Good acoustics cost real $, and always will, while the cost of digitals could theoretically get Foxconned down to almost nothing.

Which digitals have you played on?

I am used to regularly playing steinway B's and D's, and I was still very impressed by the high end digital models I sampled recently. They felt better to play than most upright pianos I have played.

Not that this is really a fair comparison. I think it's quite important to consider than digital pianos are much cheaper than acoustic pianos, therefore it's unreasonable to expect them to be able to sound the same as a piano that costs £100,000.

Edit: Just saw your edit

I try out the new models every couple years, just to see what's going on. Maybe you've played a model that I haven't played. But I don't need to play them to know what they sound like; listening to them is enough. If you can recommend a particular model, I'll play it within the next few weeks and report back.

Newer models have to played in person to compare. They don't sound as good through headphones, or a computer, the sound is too 'clean'. The Kawai CA-95 for example, has a wooden soundboard, which gives the sound a much warmer, resonant sound, and when playing it you feel the whole instrument (and the room) vibrate in the same way you do with a real piano. The action it uses has full length (inside the case I mean) wooden keys which pivot like a grand piano action and uses the same lever mechanism, although on smaller scale. The shiny plasticy keys of yesteryear are replaced with ones which look and feel like ivory. It really does feel very convincing. The yamaha Avant Grand series have real grand piano actions in them, and as such feel indistinguishable from playing a grand piano (but in the size of an upright).

I've tried Avant Grands already. Will check out the Kawai. My comments above are about the sound, not the feel.

I'm looking forward to the release of the Kawai CS10, which is essentially the CA-95, but inside the same case as their K-2 acoustic pianos.

One also has to consider what the instrument is going to be used for. If, like me, you are a (soon to be ex) conservatoire student who needs a practice instrument for complex and difficult music but you can't afford an acoustic piano that is good enough, you can't do much better than the avant grand. Sure, the sound is not quite there yet, but essentially you are paying £5000 for a high quality grand piano action that would otherwise cost you many times that and take up many times the space. For my purposes, the action is more important than the sound, and that is something that modern digital pianos do very well.

That's all very reasonable, but I was never addressing anything here other than the sound of digitals, which is completely unlike the sound of acoustics. That doesn't mean that I think digitals are useless.