I have been reading the forum lately and I noticed it seems that Viscount pianos have gotten a bad rap here lately. I don't konw why I seem to recall talking with the reps from Viscount earlier this week when researching my piano purchase. It seems to me that they are a very well sampled. It would seem that a Clavinova would and is from the information i have found is they sample yamaha's. Roland and Viscount are two piano's that use a Steinway Grand Piano. Between the two I personally prefer the sound and action of the Viscount. I own the Opera model. I have used clavinova's when I was at college and rolands in High School. I have also found that the non viscount digitals tend to have a additional sound that isn't piano key related they tended to thump against their solinoids and this was annoying. I personally have to give Viscount a thumbs up in creating an action for a piano that does a very respectable job making a piano that is affordible and still behaves like a nice spinet.

FYI -- Roland uses a variety of pianos for their samples -- not just Steinway.

If you like your Viscount, then good for you.

If you have ever been involved in creating a sample, program envelopes and tweaking frequencies to mirror the acoustic piano, it's not about which piano was sampled.

Which piano is sampled is just a way to point and say "look, it's good!"

The way the action feels, the response time of the CPU on note clusters and heavily sustained passages (minimizing delay=optimal), and the tone quality and velocity curve coupled with appropriate sampling techiques all contribute to the sound of the instrument.

So when something is a pile, it's not because they sampled a chinese piano.