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Hello all

I have a question that may be hard. I saw a interesting early player piano in the youtube video below on time 3:25 span.
The player piano has a board that is placed on the top and cranked through to make it play. Does anyone know what these are called? Besides barrel piano, i cant find anything that comes close, so it must be very very very early form of player piano. email me or let me know jasonbeard3038@yahoo.com
Thanks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSG_...D5E546AFE127B&index=0&playnext=1

that's got to be a debain antiphonel

Thank you! The art case and company is Debain I am sure, French. (But what is the player system called?) I have never seen a player piano with a plank board. Instead its of card paper or paper roll. The case is very nice, I saw a Debain in Houston once at a antique shop,or something like it. Would be nice for the collection I have, but was $12,000. Not really in my budget, and no player system. LOL

the system is called antiphonel

Obviously very hard to come by, I have found very little about them, or many still around but for museums. Funny how things develop so fast.

Thank you for your help

it was an awful system. the problem with those barrel pianos is that it was hard to change tunes, and the barrels were big. the advantage of that wood plank with the metal hooks on it was that if you vary the depth of the hooks you can play louder or softer and it's simple to change songs, just use a different piece of wood.

What sucked is that you have to sit there feeding planks of wood into your piano, so it was pretty awful. street musicians couldn't use it because they needed to hawk their wares, home musicians couldn't use it because how can you entertain at a party when you are putting a new piece of wood into your piano every 30 seconds.

In 1865 when Welte invented the roll player piano the only thing this piano could do better was dynamics, and when Welte-Mignon invented the reproducing piano in 1904 all these experiments in player pianos were over, because now you had a long playing piano that could accurately reproduce any song with dynamics pretty close to how the performer played the piece.

So it was a pretty awful invention. Interesting though.

Very cool.
I have a small barrel piano, so I know what you mean. But they are fun to play around with.

Thanks