Digital Piano Mechanics

Hi Christian1,

to your list I would also add the Casio "Natural Grand Hammer Action". Perhaps a real-life test is more useful/effective than a comparative examination of technical specifications.

--

alberto

I had never heard of weight on digital actions.

Regarding weight/grammage, I really wouldn't know how to answer. It has never occurred to me to go try a digital piano and bring my own weights to evaluate the downweight and return weight of a digital piano action, even though it could be interesting.

If you want, we can find the technical specifications for these actions and discuss them, but the discussion would be somewhat sterile. Actions simply need to be tested. The fact remains that I fully agree with Alberto's intervention. Casio has produced excellent actions that I recommend you go and try.

I am joining this post to ask you if you have tried them and what the differences are between these two digital models:

- casio ap 700

- casio gp 300

the second one I know well and I like it very much....I study with it with enormous satisfaction.

is the ap 700 very different in terms of action, weight, and feeling? Is it missing the entire hammer part that simulates a grand piano, or am I wrong?

if I am not mistaken there is about a thousand euro difference in cost....what justifies this difference....

I found while searching thoroughly on the internet... the ap 700 is not a hybrid and therefore does not have the mechanism that simulates an acoustic one! what a shame

The problem lies in the fact that we are almost always faced with a "simulation" of the mechanics. The mechanics of an acoustic piano, which has certain resistances—not always excessively, fortunately, but pleasant and useful if they are right. Those famous "frictions" I talk about so much. In digital, we could even be faced with a downward weight of 60g and not perceive the discomfort, precisely because of the scarcity or diversity of these resistances, which there, in digital, turn out to be quite relative and, if anything, "artificial." Therefore, keyboard weights on digital instruments are entirely relative! It is also for this reason, and not only, that I find it necessary and educational—even when studying for convenience on a digital instrument—to return from time to time to an acoustic piano, whether it is in good condition or "beaten up." That is "the piano." I hope I have made my thoughts clear.

Crystal clear, Paolo!

People always talk about "practice" pianos for studying in contexts where an acoustic one is unusable, but a certain type of study can only be done on an acoustic... there is no doubt about this.

However, it is right to recognize that today's digital pianos are so beautiful. I have changed my mind quite a bit thanks to the advice in the forum.

Digital is gaining a lot of ground, but to make an analogy, it seems to me a bit like the thought of Niccolò Cusano, who said that human knowledge is like a polygon inscribed in a circle; no matter how many angles we add, the polygon will never reach the circle, which represents universal knowledge of everything. This comparison is very beautiful because if you think about it, digital yearns to tend more and more towards the analog, even if its domain of existence makes such a thing impossible. In digital, we find ourselves in a discrete domain by definition; acoustic belongs to the continuous domain. Those who have played on digital for a long time, upon returning to acoustic, will not struggle to notice this: the different sensations under the fingers, the enveloping sound produced by the vibration not of a membrane immersed in a magnetic field, but of a large soundboard that vibrates in its entirety, filling environments and bodies with sound. We do not listen only with our ears, but with our whole body. Filling ourselves with sound gives us a sense of satisfaction; what we derive from digital, we always perceive as 'missing something'.

Digital will continue to grow and probably one day the differences will be difficult to hear. For the moment, we are limited by our technology and by data processing and transport speeds.

The first problem to solve (easily solvable) will be creating a new serial protocol to replace MIDI which, although universally used, has major limitations, such as the 128 representable dynamic levels that cause us to lose some nuances that could be important from a psychoacoustic perspective.

Increasing this number by 7 bits, bringing it even one bit further, would allow this level to reach 256 levels, but we would have major problems with data management involving very large libraries and a substantially heavy workload for the CPU.

We must wait for new architectures, new systems. Today, FPGA architecture is promising, although little work is still being done in the field of libraries. Probably, if the CPUs of future computers do not find significant improvements—given the almost reached atomic limit in the dimensions of tracks on silicon wafers—one will have to opt for dedicated hardware. A sort of stand-alone electronics to be connected to the PC that will only handle processing samples and sending them to the computer's sound card to be played.

There will be many solutions; time will confirm this. The fact remains that, by definition, acoustic will be unreachable, both at the level of mechanics and sound... My modest opinion.

I don't think it is modest. I think it is the only opinion.

I have played both for years. Imagine that I had a Gem that featured a mechanism with a double escapement approved by the Institute of Mechanics of Siena... so the booklet stated.. a keyboard that was also heavy for the hand... but it's useless... music was born on the ground, from striking empty pipes or from the wind blowing through them cut in section... or horsehair, strings... I feel the bass of my Yamaha U3

, now truly proven, rising from beneath my feet... the exaggerated emphasis of digitals perhaps pushes so hard to fill these voids but... alas... that is the piano... as Paolo used to say.

In complete agreement...