While I am not an employee of either Young Chang or YCNA—I am an independent design and manufacturing consultant—I can answer some of the technical questions you pose. Sales and marketing questions will have to be fielded by others.
Why should someone consider a Young Chang in today's market?
What gives the piano an edge - if at all?
What makes the piano different from others?
Timbral balance, dynamics and tone.
I put a lot of effort into improving the tone quality—the timbre—of these pianos across their entire compass but particularly through the bass and low tenor areas of the shorter scales.
I removed all of the bass bridge cantilevers to improve energy transfer efficiency. I moved the bridges forward on all scales and
floated the soundboard around the lower end of the bass bridges. Moving the bridge did shorten the speaking lengths moderately but it also dramatically increased the backscale length giving the bridge/soundboard assembly greater freedom of motion in the low bass. Moving the hitchpin panels further back on the redesigned string frames also helped to increase the backscale length though the low bass.
I have reduced inharmonicity in the bass so that the frequency of the shorter partials (higher harmonics) is closer to that of the fundamental for improved pitch identification. During normal play the cumulative result of all of these changes results in a tone quality through the entire bass that the ear—brain, actually—is able more quickly identify the pitch of the individual notes.
I also put a lot of effort into balancing the string scaling with the impedance characteristics of the soundboard system to make the bass-to-tenor transition as smooth as possible. In most cases this is now what I call “musically transparent.†That is, while a technician skilled at voicing (and analyzing the timbre of piano notes) can probably pick out the transitions, it will be the rare pianist who will be able to do so without looking.
All grands, large and small, use cutoff bars on the soundboard system. And all of the grands use inserts—a piece I call a “fish†due to its shape—in the treble sections to shape—and reduce the size of—the vibrating area of the soundboard.
In scaling the pianos I reduced the overall string tensions. This allows—requires—the use of lighter and more flexible soundboard systems along with lighter and more resilient hammers. This latter requirement necessitated significant changes in how the hammers are pressed. It is a lot easier to simply crank out heavy, dense hammers than it is to walk that fine between hammers that are too soft and mushy to be of any practical use and hammers that are too hard to develop the desired tone quality. Quantifying hammer performance—in short, putting a number on it—led me to develop a new method of testing production hammers for resiliency. (There will be more about this over the next year or so as I introduce it to technicians through the Journal and in seminars and conferences.)
The actions have not changed much. The geometry of the wippens was always very close to that of comparable Renner parts, now it is identical. The overall action ratio has been changed to lighten up the touch a bit.
Piano design features do not work in isolation; they are integrated systems that, at their best, should have a certain synergy. (Those who have attended any of my recent seminars will be familiar with my
Design Triad philosophy in which I stress the importance of balancing all of the various elements of piano design.) All of the changes made to these pianos have been designed to work together (at least to the best of my ability to make them so). In terms of perceived sound pressure they may not sound as loud as their predecessors (or some competitive instruments) but this is the tradeoff you get when you reduce the amount of energy in the (mostly high-partial) attack power spike and put more of it into the fundamental and lower partials. In the smaller rooms in which these pianos are expected to be used power is
never a big issue but timbral diversity is. The overall result is significant is some areas—the low bass, for example—and more subtle in others but the overall effect has been an across-the-board improvement in musicality; that elusive character that draws a pianist back to a specific instrument.
This is probably more than you ever wanted to read on the subject—but you did ask!
Some of the grands have been recently re-developed by Dell Fandrich: I personally found them very nice indeed.
How about the larger grands, anything new?
The large grands have also been redesigned. The market for small grands is
much larger than it is for large grands so the emphasis has been on getting the smaller pianos refined and in full production. Some of the larger pianos are available in some markets but I don’t know which. As I wrote earlier, I don’t actually work for the company and I don’t follow marketing and production strategies all that closely. Someone from the company will have to respond to specific questions on availability.
How about the uprights?
Any new developments for tonal improvement?
The same design concepts used in the short grands are being incorporated into the vertical piano designs.
[quote]Which pianos would you recommend worth testing and comparing against others at next January's NAMM in Anaheim?
Assuming I will be at the coming NAMM show look me up and I’ll give you a guided tour.
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