Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum Top digital v Acoustic

I have so far been playing on digital 8 years and now I look for more expression in my music.I feel that I now need a acoustic piano.
Money and space are my main issues, so I cant have a grand. I have seen on internet , reconditioned Yamaha U3s built in the late 70s and early 80s for about £3000.At this price I can get a top of the range Digital.

Can a old upright that as mostly replace parts be more expressive instrument than a top digital today?

I've noticed that Chris Venables in U.K. is stocking Yamaha's own refurbished U3's from the 70's for £3250. I would trust Yamaha to offer something akin to original playing quality and sound in those pianos.

Using that sort of old U3 as a basis for comparison, I would say that a digital at the same price cannot equal the old U3's sound production and projection into the air.. You would have to go much higher in a digital price to get beyond speakers that are very limiting, and kind of cheap really.

However, in terms of expressive range, some of the current chips such as the Roland Supernatural offer amazing expressive range. They can handle forte and above without much flattening out of tone and can offer different colors at different touch velocities. The problem is that all this is still best handled through headphones at the price levels you're talking about.

If your living situation allows you to play an acoustic without concerns about bothering other people, the old U3 will give you something that any digital at £3000 can't.

People will probably disagree with me (and that's okay), but personally I think that for $3000 and under a digital is better than an upright. It won't have as much presence and the sound might not be as full. However, the action on top end digitals is great - when I was on a budget I decided that the feel was most important to me. That way I could transition more easily to a grand when I have the money. The action on my digital has a very nice feel with double escapement. It also has great partial-pedaling and sympathetic vibration. Though the sounds are sampled from grand pianos and sound very nice, they do grow old after a couple years.

With my high end studio monitor speakers, I can get the room to rumble with the bass, which I think actually sounds better most uprights. Like turnadot said, you need really really nice speakers - better than the ones that come with the piano (if they come with speakers, some don't). My speakers cost me around $1k I think. That can limit how much you can spend on a digital and make a digital too expensive.

It's a tradeoff - you probably need to try both and see what you like more and what better suits your needs.

Give Chris Venables a call. Audition some upright pianos, he has various, maybe a new Venables & Sons, compare them to digital, I am sure you will come to the conclusion that nothing beats the real thing.

Good luck!!

Have you heard of anybody on this forum deal with Mark goodwin pianos.They have a web site and here is where I have been looking at the Yamaha U3 reconditioned.
I will take a look at Chris Venables ,thanks

As good as the supernatural is, there is a certain structure to its tone, that the piano player will after a period of time become familiar with and after that the possibilities are not so endless as they are with even an inexpensive acoustic.

I have no connection with Chris Venables, but live near his shop and have tried pianos there, not bought one, but he is genuine and will certainly provide the time and expertise to help you decide.

Darren,

I only mentioned Chris Venables because he is stocking Yamaha's own reconditioned U3's. After decades of fighting the grey market, Yamaha has decided -- if you can't beat em, join 'em. I would fully expect Yamaha to give a first-class effort to the task, and I would also expect their five-year warranty to have meaning, especially offered through the U.K''s premier Yamaha dealer.

Mr. Goodwin's site has been linked before on this forum. A member was asking opinions on Goodwin's claims that Yamaha doesn't make pianos like they used to and he has the goods on their dirty little secret. I don't t think that any member every posted here after checking Goodwin out. It might be interesting for you to compare some of his refurbished oldies with Yamaha's own work. Prices are probably pretty close.

I agree with the comment that after a while a digital can become very familiar, perhaps more so that an acoustic. However, a lot of the familiarity is based on consistency that comes from never going out of tune and never having its wooden parts affected by swelling and contraction.

I also agree with the comment that many of today's digital actions are extremely user friendly. They are all they need to be without resorting to repliaating the complicated contraption that governs acoustics.

As to the real piano comment, ignore it. If interpretation of music is your goal, this kind of pettiness is irrelevant.

Ive been and had a look at Chris venables web site and had a listen to his very good quality video demos of the Venable & Sons piano and I have got to say how impressed I am .What an amazing warm crisp smooth sound from an upright and affordable at that.

Ive listened to Rolands super natural sound on youtube and the roland web site and I dont like it.It sounds terribly harsh and edgey after demoing Venables & Sons pianos.

His shop is about 175 miles from where I live so it would have to be a special visit.Maybe when spring is upon us I will find the time to go down there.

Oh it sounds to me like you are a little biased here and most certainly oversimplifying things. Granted budget is a major factor in determining what samples will be brought from each variety whether digital or acoustic for our discussion. But on a given acoustic, take the U3 for example which I am familiar with, we can sit down for an hour and experiment with different ways to strike chords, play pieces, scales, etc, and I believe there is more tonal variety that can be demonstrated then say on a Roland 307 (a digital piano I am also very familiar with) even with its 3 grand piano samples. I find that amount of expressive quality is lacking in the high end digitals. This is outside of temperature, tuning and humidity factors.

My opinion, and this is entirely subjective coming from a person who barely has a creative cell in his body but does have a very observant ear, is the digitals source of its greatest strength and its greatest weakness lies in the fact that a human designs it. The high end digitals take the supernatural sound engine has many demonstratable subtle effects and nuances programmed into its grand piano settings. Some of these overlap,some of them are irritating, but all of them are exact and consistent. Why are all these little quirks programmed into it? To replicate an acoustic. So what is the real world result of a human trying to replicate a piano (a terribly complex thing that we also created) which has endless factors and variables) ?

What we need is a super powerful AI and tell it to build a digital for us !!!

As for the touch, yeah its good on modern digitals, but I still haven't heard a modern digital that accurately does the sound of the action as you play.

After being convinced I would put up to $3K into a top quality digital, I wound up with a $4500 upright. My older digital remains as a middle of the night instrument but will be replaced one day with a better one.

Kurt

After being convinced I would put up to $3K into a top quality digital, I wound up with a $4500 upright. My older digital remains as a middle of the night instrument but will be replaced one day with a better one.

Kurt

So what are you saying exactly.
It sounds to me you were dissapointed with a upright acoustic that was more costly than a digital costing a lot less.Is that right?

I don't think I'm biased. I think it's more the case that I'm tolerant of the shortcomings of both acoustics and digitals because I see them as different instruments with different orientations to the same basic purpose -- to make music. Also I carry around with me the understanding that the limitations of either species are much less significant than my own limitations as a player.

Now, people 'make' music in different ways. There's reciting prescriptive literature. There's composition. Somewhere between the two lies improvisation. If it's reciting, particularly classical, I would have a personal bias toward acoustic pianos. It's not a working bias because I have no interest in reciting prescriptive lit, classical or otherwise. If it's improvisation, it's 50/50 for me, not the same, but equally attractive. If it's composition, I have a pronounced bias toward digital piano with headphones, but that bias extends only to me in the execution of my music. If a composer feels more comfortable with an acoustic piano as a tool, that's fine. Whatever! It's all good. It's all different.

On the aspect you've elaborated on here



Your words struck a chord (sorry) with me. I once spent a couple of hours playing around with Dominic Harlan's Musica Ricarata II, the music that Kubrick chose for his last film Wide Eyes Shut. I happened to be playing on an old U3. That U3 gave me a great depth of tone. The sound wasn't as throaty as Harlan's original (my guess Steinway), but it was close. My digital couldn't come close at all. However, you have to remember three things.

First, in Harlan's piece the tonality means almost everything, just as in your playing around with scales and chords on the U3 the tonality meant almost everything. In terms of content Musica Ricarata II is minimalist. Most music is music in motion and notes that pass between the important notes in the expressive landscape are often played as indistinctly as unstressed vowels are pronounced in a language. A digital can easily handle the tonal demands of this kind of music, and this kind of music is far more prevalent than Harlan's stuff. I doubt that too many members here have sat down and recited Harlan to the amaziment of their families and friends

The second thing to remember is that digitals are improving. The Supernatural chip probably wouldn't come that close either to a well-tuned better-class acoustic in handling Musica Rcarata II, but it is definitely closer than the chips of five years ago.

The third thing is that the tonal production of digitals is limited, in most cases severely limited, by the obvious limitations of cheesy speakers. What is in the chip is best evaluated through excellent headphones. If you recal my response to the OP, that's why I told him the old U3 would give him something he couldn't get in a $3k digital.

Did I oversimplify? I'm not sure. I tried to give a simple answer to a very specific question. There is no sense in reviewing an exhaustive list of strengths and weaknesses of the two species. That's been done many times on this forum. Invariably it brings out the extreme elements: the spec mavens of the digital camp and the pride-of-acoustic ownership gasbags of the opposing camp who bifurcate the piano world into real pianos and phony pianos. Who needs that?

So in addressing the OP's question, I mentioned the cheesy speakers as a limitation of digitals and taking into account that in all likelihood the OP's reference digital was 8 years old, I mentioned the improvements in digital chips that have occurred since then. I don't think that improvement is my opinion. I think any reasonable person with any actual working knowledge of digitals woud concede that. I cited in particular the improvements at the loud end of dynamic range. It is a fact that the newest chips handle loudness without the degree of flattening of tone what was the norm a few years ago.

The OP has since posted that he has listened to sound samples of the Roland supernatural and of the Venables acoustic on the net and has concluded that the Roland is harsh while the Venables acoustic is warm and expressive. That leads me to believe that for his process of evaluation, my 'oversimplified' comments were probably not simple enough. I would never reach a conclusion based on sound samples on the Net, but.......

Turandot, I agree with many of the things you just spoke about. If you go back and look at my previous post I had quoted you, and I was referring to what was in the quotes specifically when I said you are over simplifying.

Art A.,

We're not disagreeing. We're discussing possible bias and oversimplification.

I just looked at the quotes you excerpted. If the thread continues without turning into a snowball fight, I'll post again on those specific points. And I realize that your own opinions are not that different than mine. I also realize that your comments are thoughtful. That's why I tried to explain.

One thing of yours that I didn't understand was:



Could you elaborate on "the sound of the action as you play"?

Yeah "sound of the action" was terrible wording on my part, I meant to say hammer noise.

I'm not into snowball fights either, just back to my original comment was specifically on this statement that I disagree with:

" I agree with the comment that after a while a digital can become very familiar, perhaps more so that an acoustic. However, a lot of the familiarity is based on consistency that comes from never going out of tune and never having its wooden parts affected by swelling and contraction. "

Art,

What is it exactly that you diagree with? Are you saying that acoustic pianos do not go out of tune on a regular basis and that their performance is not affected by climate changes? Are you saying that it happpens but that it's irrelevant?

I think that you need to say a little more than that you simply don't agree.

BTW Are you saying that you would like to head "hammer noise" in a digital?

Just in case some folks missed it, the OP said £3000, _not_ $3000, so basically about $4800USD, more or less.

We spent some time recently listening to some U1/U3 refurbs and some brand new ones. I don't know if the refurbs were "official", but there was an obvious tonal difference between the old units (2 U1's and 1 U3) and the newer models (1 of each). I don't know what's changed, or if nothing has changed and I'm just hearing the differences in age and materials of the refurbs but I did find it quite interesting. It was evident enough that it kind of turned us off of the refurbs.

I thought I was clear in my first post, I'll try again. You said

"I agree with the comment that after a while a digital can become very familiar, perhaps more so that an acoustic. However, a lot of the familiarity is based on consistency that comes from never going out of tune and never having its wooden parts affected by swelling and contraction. "

In using the terminology "become familiar with" I am referring to the sound / tone characteristics you can achieve. Is that also what you are thinking about ?

The way you have worded it makes it sound like the only reason a digital can be easier to comprehend (ie become more familiar) to the piano player is that it does not have the shortcomings of an acoustic. I am saying the converse. The acoustic is a far more diverse instrument because of its increased variability in touch, velocity, pressure, release, pedals, etc. All of this is outside the design limitations such as tuning, humidity levels, action regulation etc.

I can't play the opening to Bach, Partita 2 the same way twice on the acoustic on the same day, at the same sitting, same state of tune, same temperature and humidity levels. There are always slight differences in the tone, the resonances etc. I am trying to get consistent, but depending on how I strike the keys it can sound different. It was far more consistent sounding on the digital.

I find the acoustic more rewarding and addictive.

A curious circumstance you describe. The acoustic is "more rewarding and addictive", but yet you are trying to train yourself to eliminate the attributes that apparently make it so by being more consistent? Question, is the consistency of the digital at a level that is above, equal, or below that of your inconsistent acoustic playing? I assume that your average playing on the acoustic still beats out the high level consistent playing on the digital or else we wouldn't be having this conversation

Note that the attribute of variability that you describe is not exactly considered a desirable thing by all pianists and it is also true that it varies considerably between acoustics. for example, you may not like our acoustic because we've found that it is much easier to play consistently than many others we've run across (esp uprights).