Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum WORST piano's *ever*-which brand/type would get your vote & why?

Bachophile,

There is an interesting anecdote which Kenny Werner tells in Effortless Mastery about how Bill Evans was at a muscians house party which had a notoriously bright piano (make not specified but definitely implied). A few other great professional pianists were there and the piano was giving everyone migraines. Then Bill Evans sat down and made it sound warm and sweet. He had the touch, and sensitivity to reel in the instrument.

There are greats and then there are GREATS.

Steinwegge:

Taiwan.

Oh, there's one more:

"Connover Cable".

At least the ones with plastic whippens,jacks and flanges.

All crumbling like powder after some 30 odd years.

[But still not making good cake..... ]

Norbert

How bout adding Sojin to this sorry list? The product of a large Korean Conglomerate who thought they could build anything.

you forgot weinstein and sons

Winter and Company.

Was Connover Cable the Irish company that made even the keys out of plastic? I shared a house in Toronto for a while in the mid-Seventies with a guy who had one of those disasters. The action, such as it was, seemed to be holding together. But the keys' breaking one after another doomed the poor thing.

We took a Belarus on trade years ago and my tech left a note on the piano that "Any inference that this is a musical instrument is criminal "

I’m thinking the old “Conover” (as in Frank Conover) pianos were pretty well built and nice pianos; I owned an early 1900’s Conover upright that I was impressed with.

If my memory regarding my previous research is correct, the Cable piano company bought out Conover and produced the “Conover-Cable". And, the old “Cable” pianos, though not top of the line, were decent.

Most any brand that has not been cared for or serviced regularly can be a bad piano. Many lesser known brands that are well prepped by a competent tech can be decent instruments.

Based on my limited experiences regarding acoustic pianos so far, (the last 6 or 7 years… a drop in the bucket, I know) I think it is prudent to stick with the better known, well established, brand names. I have a Yamaha, a Baldwin and a Kawai in my home. I like them all.

Rick

Both these Pianos are some of the best to go for, I recommend anyone planning to purchase, to go get it!

********************************** - Selling 20k
********************************** - Selling 14k

***Edited by moderator... direct advertising.
You can advertise your pianos here on PW in the "Pianos for sale" section, not on the open forums.***

But they pale in comparitive putridity to birdcage pianos
COMPARITIVE PUTRIDITY!!! There's a great statement. Can I use these words again? Love them! Thanks velopresto. I would guess this statement has never been voiced in such eloquence, Kudos!

Ummmm.... did anybody notice this thread was started in 2004?!?

Haha! I thought my dad was the only one who called bad pianos a pso. I've never heard anyone else do that until now. I probably need to get out more.

Mychal

Wow! I didn't. And the last post before today was November 15th, 2004. Exactly eight years ago to the day.

Mychal

Things are kinda slow around here, Monica.

Did I miss it, or did no one mention Suzuki?

PianoPlayer's post may be intentionally comedic or just a put on, but I can't imagine it's intended as a Perzina plug. It's so outrageous that no one intending to seriously plug Perzina would post like that.

PL,

Maybe you didn't catch Monica's post above. You are responding to an 8 year old discussion, and giving it currency again. PP61 hasn't posted here since this thread was young.

As a technician, I have to chuckle at the idea of this thread. I believe that the vast majority of piano players have way too small a sample size of the instruments mentioned to make such broad generalizations about quality.

The best companies occasionally make a lemon, and the worst companies occasionally accidentally make a good one!

By far, any piano's performance relates more to the care and service it receives than what name is on the key cover.

Karl Strauss! - Horrible!

Samick, Young Chang.

Interesting how some of these topics somehow get a second life years after they have been initially put to bed.

Whenever this discussion comes up—as it does from time to time when piano technicians gather together—I tend to get some philosophical: before arriving at an answer I think we have to define “worst ever.”

As always in these discussions squares and over-damper uprights have been nominated for the title but is that really fair? Both of these designs were state-of-the-art at one time. And, over time, I’ve encountered examples of both types that have been quite credible instruments. And others that are strong contenders for the title. Do we have the right, today, to contemptuously dismiss either of these body types just because our ancestors took what was learned from those early efforts and developed what we now laughingly call the “modern” piano?

Many, if not most, piano technicians and more than a few pianists have considerable respect those big old uprights that are now beginning to populate our landfills. But some of them really deserve to end up there! Not all of the pianos built during those most golden years of American piano production—roughly from 1890 to 1930—could make any legitimate claims on either structural or musical competence. Some of them were rubbish from the start.

We find it easy to toss pianos like the late—and largely unlamented—Grand Spinets into this category. Still, for many families this was the best they were going to get. We look back on them today with derision and wonder why people ever bought them but we do so from today’s perspective not from the perspective of the day. We forget that when the Grand Spinet made its impact on the music world it was considered a good value. It was less expensive than those “used uprights” we so often compare them with today. We forget those used uprights were 40 or 50 years younger than they are today and were still a viable part of the piano marketplace.

Just what criteria do we use to create the designation “worst ever” piano? Consider the first six letters of the word “designation.” Do pianos qualify on the basis of their “design?” Or their construction? Or the materials used? Or do they have to qualify in each category? A couple of weeks ago I tuned a short (probably 5’ 2” or so) Aldrich grand—how many of you have ever heard of those?—that was rather indifferently built using materials of only fair-to-middling quality that still, after some 90 years of service, still sounds quite credible because of its outstanding design. I’d love to rebuild that little piano; it would put more than a few “high-end” contemporary grands to shame! And it looks a lot better as well. Yet on the basis of its construction and materials many would include it in their list of “worst ever.”

Conversely, there are more than a few so-called “modern” pianos that I’d put on my list of “worst ever” based solely on their design. Without naming names—I still want to be allowed to visit NAMM and the Frankfurt Musikmesse and I’d prefer not being banned from the Piano Forum for life—I’ll just mention in passing that if you build it well enough even a mediocre (or worse) design can be made to sound pretty good. It may require an inordinate amount of technical skill to keep it sounding good but who cares; it bears a prestigious name and it costs a whole lot of money so it must be worth it.

I think Ryan pretty much covered things when he said,

We tend to forget that not all of these pianos—the ones that end up on our “worst-ever” lists—were built for the ages. The Grand Console was never intended to be the equal of a Steinway Model 100—although when equally well-prepped there wasn’t that much difference in their performance—and this difference was reflected in their pricing. For the price of that Steinway you could have purchased a half-dozen Grand Consoles, put five of them in storage and handed out a brand new piano to each successive generation; they’d still be going strong in 2060! But today we tend to judge them on the same overall value scale. We compare even the best over-damper upright to the modern upright and condemn them because we don’t like working on them. We condemn the square because, well, they are square. And we don’t know how to work on them. And, yes, there are clear performance limitations to their design but—when compared to their modern counterparts—there are limitations to the design of cars built a century back as well. But we lovingly cherish and restore old cars to technical and materials standards undreamed of by their original manufacturers.

Maybe we need to give some of these old pianos the same breaks we give to other really old things. After all, we don’t expect a 1930s radio or a 1950 television or a 1980s computer to compete directly with their 2012 counterparts do we?

ddf