Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Forum why there's huge price gap between different piano brands?

In the end, an object is worth as much as someone is prepared to pay for it. And this applies just as much to pianos as it does to those hideous auctions of some so-called 'celebrity's' wardrobe or knick-knacks.

Which pianist's eyes wouldn't drool at the name of an ancient and venerable Austro-German name on the fallboard? I know mine would, and I'm not a sentimental person (except when my eyes water when Mimi expires in La bohème - but that's another story ). And I'd then play that particular piano with a certain expectation, almost willing it to be met......

If one didn't know the real brand of well-built piano (say its original name was painted over and replaced with a famous Austro-German brand), but it was perfectly regulated and tuned, and voiced to sound 'European', even though it's made in Indonesia, would one not still enthuse about its 'soul' (as someone said earlier) and then, when informed that it was actually a mass-produced cheap piano made in South-East Asia, change one's mind suddenly?

Good point.

However, not all pianos made in South-East Asoa are any longer "mass-produced" or "cheap"

There's a new species emerging that once again is raising the bar and changing the equation by considerable margin.

Last week's NAMM anybody?

Norbert

My immediate reaction on skimming through this thread is that it is substantially over analysed.

Most products with substantial similarity vary in price because of perceived value. Luxury biscuits and cheap biscuits cost much the same to make but sell for significant price differentials. Branding and marketing are big factors. These factors influence consumer perception of value.

Quality, currency, warranty, materials are all relevant too of course.

I have no illusions about my U3, but I did not do a good job of conveying my mental image. I wasn't suggesting that 1969's assembly methods and materials are unsatisfactory to me, I was trying to convey the idea that there is some value to me in having a piano made of wood that was touched at least a few times by human hands during manufacture, even if the resulting instrument is more expensive or less than perfect because of it.

I spend my days with computers, in a world made of plastic, and every item made as cheaply as possible; when I come home and sit at my piano I want a break from that.

I wouldn't think of it. I hate those car analogies. I just quoted you because I enjoyed your shovel metaphor.

Designer eyewear is a better way to go. Prices on the corrective lenses that help you see better exist within a narrow range. Prices on the frames that supposedly help you look better ex ist across the whole banwidth of human foolishness. A lot of high-end piano purchases are intended to make one look bertter.

I won't break any new ground by suggesting that it's basically supply and demand. The first response from Back to Study Piano laid that out. But to develop it a little further.........

Piano makers in the market have different stories to sell. Some stories stretch across decades, even centuries. The makers will bill you for that. Other makers have stories that are quite short and have unappealing plot twists. Those makers will use an appealing price to compensate for their shortcomings in story-telling.

Let's say you're a limited production boutique Euro maker with a ton of history. You make 500 pianos annually. Your task is to find 500 people world-wide who will buy your story. That's not a tough task with the right marketing approach. Limited production will keep the slim order book in good shape, keep your smalll staff of core workers motivated, and allow you to participate in the lifestyle that your predecessors set. You may be into your own story enough to be meticulous in preserving it and even bold enough to attempt to raise the bar yet higher. Or you may be lazy and simply trade off reputation while letting things slide.. Either way, you only need those 500 cognoscenti who believe that it's the superior sound that beckons their superior ears (and not the pressure of their wallet's thickness on their superior buttocks.)

Alternatively, let's say you're an emerging Chinese maker whose task it is to get his own people to believe that his products are something quite different from the bitter fruits of the People's Revolution. You really need and want to make it elsewhere (the West) to show the folks back home that you can play ball on the world stage. You offer enticing prices, reasonably good materials, and ever-improving quality of labor. Hey, maybe one day you'll have your own story, but in the meantime, you'll take what you can get (incrementally).

Obviously, these are extremes, and any resemblance to reality is accidental. In the middle you have an annoying company with a true global vision (Yamaha) that has the wherewithal to offer good product in all price ranges from the $500 digital to the Bosie Imperial. Then you have Steinway with its strategy of monopolizing the concert stages and music schools to force you to see the light.

There are a lot of other stories out there of course, but many of them are frankly quite boring and the pianos that present them orally quite nondescript. But despite the breadth of the muddled middle, the piano market is defined by extremes, as you've noticed.

"...Branding and marketing are big factors. These factors influence consumer perception of value. Quality, currency, warranty, materials are all relevant too of course..."

Concisely and well stated. 'Marketing' and 'branding' are such short words, but think of the effort over many years that a house such as Steinway has put into these ephemerals--- and, has cashed in.

'Warranty service' and 'aftermarket,' including dealer networks, and building a company's reputation for doing right by their customers... easy to say, but not every company gets there. To me, Kawai would be a good example of a company which has built this kind of reputation. Consumer confidence is worth money.

And, speaking of the innards having changed, Kawai's forward-looking use of new action materials which out-perform wood is one example of how it's really not true that the product has remained the same for the last century. Elephant-sparing non-ivory keytops is another especially grateful example. WNG's radically new action parts is another good example. Steingraber has already been mentioned; laminate soundboards have not, but they're with us. Modern finishes and glues alone represent tremendous technical advances. So the OP's premise is quite faulty, though the question is understandable, given the products' similar appearance.

Objectively, the biggest difference in cost is labor. It is not so simple as one piano taking 150 man hours and another taking 600 man hours. Every extra hour taken in production costs much more than the $30 it took to pay for the extra hour of labor. There is a domino effect. You can't make as many pianos so materials cost more per unit. You can't sell as many pianos so you have to make a higher margin on each individual unit. You have to charge more to your retailer so your retailer buys less of your product. The retailer has to charge the public more so the public buys less of your product. And so on and so on. It is basic business.

Of course, sales and marketing contribute enormously to differences in pricing. Why should pianos be any different than anything else? A company may make the exact same pain reliever and put it in 2 different packages, and one sells for 3 times the price of the other. Exactly the same thing. Maybe even the one that sells for 3 times the price is dramatically more popular because of an effective advertising campaign.

With pianos, much of the labor expense is purely cosmetic. Closely examine the fit and finish on a Fazioli or Bosendorfer, then do the same with a Steinway or Mason & Hamlin. Different universes. It takes a ton of extra time to get that perfectly flat, even finish. On the other hand, some of the fit and finish make for a big difference in the performance. A perfect bridge notching vs a nearly perfect bridge notching can be the difference between a note that sings and a note that chokes. The untrained eye might not even be able to see the difference.

The differences between a mediocre piano, a good piano and a great piano, performance wise, are not huge. Maybe one sings just a little better. Maybe one feels just a bit more intuitive to play, and just a bit easier to control. Maybe one has just a bit more dynamic range etc etc It can't be quantified. But those tiny differences can often be where one finds the most enjoyment in a piano. They are accumulative. So, a tiny bit better is a tiny bit better over and over again every hour you play, over the course of decades. And as you improve as a musician, whether as a beginner or as a concert pianist, and everything in between, those tiny differences become more and more noticeable.

While there is no denying the extra expense of fit and finish and materials, as I have preached here for going on a decade now, a more expensive piano does not necessarily equate to better performance. There are extremely expensive, hand crafted pianos with impressive lineage, stunning fit and finish, and glorious materials that have design issues that make them far inferior performance wise to some moderately priced pianos with adequate fit, finish and materials, but superior design. The more expensive piano may last longer, but then you just end up with long lasting poor performance.

Anyways, I guess I felt like rambling a bit.........

Spoken of like a true engineer that doesn't get it. I interact with a lot of folk who think that piano assembly is a matter of specification. Get the specs right and piano will be right. Simply execute the design as precisely and accurately as possible and you're good. (No, precision and accuracy are not the same thing). Actually, there are a number of middle-of-the-road piano manufacturers that seem to believe that it is a matter of executing specifications. That may be why they are middle-of-the-road.

The thing is that it is not about specification but performance. In order to achieve a particular performance standard, it is necessary to "tweak" in order to achieve the performance result that will otherwise necessarily vary from one unit to the next if everything in uniformly "cookie-cuttered" due to the variation in materials.
Accurate specifications can be very helpful to get things in the zone, but the final step is nothing more than educated, trained tweakage.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. It has occasionally been my lot to be taken out to an island to tune a piano in a twin-engine boat. The pilot has both engines set for the same rpm using twin tachometers. But I know they - in fact - aren't at exactly the rpm because I can hear their sound "beating" with each other. They aren't in tune, and it annoys me. The true accuracy in that case would come not from paying slavish attention to the whiz-bang tachometers, but simply listening. The same thing goes for twin-prop airplanes, as well.

Now, certainly conventional production procedures that achieve high levels of accuracy are much better than sloppy, random procedures that put out product that is all over the map instead of in the zone. But taking a piano that is in the zone and putting it on the bullseye is currently something that can't even be imagined for a mechanized production process.

Neither is this to say that piano sales people don't use misleading or inaccurate hyperbole when marketing their wares, either.

jian1zh,

Some pianos take much, much longer to make than others.
They have designs that require higher level of parts and materials and specific work methods to execute.


If you don't know the difference between pianos, I suggest visiting your friendly neighborhood piano dealer...especially one that carries pianos of varied levels at the showroom... and ask what the differences are.

You may be surprised to learn that the differences between pianos may be just as great as the differences between cars.

If you think about how readily the human ear can recognize differences between the voice qualities of each person they know-consider that these differences in vibratory spectrum energy distributed in each voice is very tiny-you will get some idea of how subtle the musical engineering of instruments is.

Not all the physics of pianos nor the musical intelligibility of humans is understood in a way accessible to piano engineers. Things such as finite element modeling are only as good as the assumptions about how all the elements interrelate. Thus makers are loath to throw out what they know works now for something that might work. The OP is correct that wood and felt has a host of challenges to manufacture something as complex, precise and durable as piano should be.

Another aspect is that, at least here, entry level pianos aren't prepared very well, and come with a "free tuning". You can be fairly sure that in most cases, regulation and voicing will be something that piano may never experience. I've played the cheaper brands in showrooms where they responded poorly - in many cases, sound like they've not been tuned. I don't doubt that they MAY have the potential to be a good piano, but I'm guessing the dealer margins are probably not sufficient to make it worth their while.

In contrast, generally, high end pianos come with more than a "free tuning", and, in some cases are regulated nicely and tuned well on the showroom floor.

Basically, if all things were equal, then there should be no reason for the price difference. However, all things are not equal!

For starters, the wood used in the soundboard : A lesser manufacturer might use MOST of their soundboard stockpile, but a manufacturer in the top tier would use as little as thirty percent of their stockpile, assigning the rest of it to other tasks.

The mechanism in a top tier piano will generally be more durable (yeah, they might all use, say, renner actions, but WHICH grade of wood?), it will have been set up far better, and the quality of the hammer felt etc, will be higher. Not always, remember, I'm talking generally.

The frame will be more precisely drilled, the rim will be more precisely put together - in some cases the continuous rim of say, Steinway (I think others do it too - Yamaha perhaps, and Mason) is a labour intensive process. Is it better? You decide.

A hand-finished piano may be more precise in this way:

Sometimes a manufacturer will put something through a computer controlled machine, and it will come out of the other side of that machine with the job done, but things might not have been set up exactly right, and the part will be a bit, well, off. In a hand-fit operation, a man will take measurements and the job won't be finished until he has decided it's exactly right. It's a bit more careful and can't be replicated on a machine. Of course, in both instances, it depends on the quality of PERSON operating the computer and the quality of person performing the equivalent task by hand.

Finally, when the piano is put together, and ready for tuning, set up, and voicing, you can't replace the ears and eyes of a skilled musician/technician (yes, they are both), whose ears will bring out the best in the instrument. It will sit in the factory and be tuned, regulated, and voiced several times over to within an inch of it's life, before it is ready to go onto the shop floor, where, HOPEFULLY (but sadly not enough), another highly skilled technician will spend a long time doing even more preparation.

Yamaha and Kawai make pianos that are an excellent mix between hand finish and computer control.
Steinway tend to be more hand finish, but they will computerize some things. Most of the designs in all pianos are using CAD.

At the end of the day, sometimes you get a cheaper chinese piano, and through prep work, it sounds amazing. Sometimes you get a Steinway, and no matter how much prep work is going into it, the piano is just not responding. These are rare situations but they do happen.

Nice job jian1zh, 1 post and you get at least 4 pages of comments. I'd say this troll struck a nerve!

Reding this thread, I'd say that those who have responded have focused on the question and not worried about what the OP's motivation might have been.

Is the question valid? All of my piano experience tells me that it is.

Has the OP's question created a firestorm? Harly. Responses other than yours have been thoughtful and non-inflammatory.

Well said.

Original poster never posted again to this thread. Y'all been trolled...

Or maybe OP was just frustrated like I was when I was shopping - "I like *this* piano! Why does it have to cost $50,000?"

Check out the nearby thread on a 1972 U3, the OP is finally making a reply 10 months later. We shouldn't be so fast to slap labels on people and should address such concerns privately to the moderators.

Whether the OP ever posted again, like the revival of old threads, makes absolutely no difference to me as long as there has been interesting discussion. If the discussion has been interesting it will be of interest to many people besides the OP.

Not only have I found this thread interesting but it raises an important question that I think has not been discussed much at PW. Many threads, although the poster is probably unaware of it, are repeats of earlier ones.

High and not-so-highly-priced pianos all have one thing in common:

They all have one FAIR price.

Norbert

There's no such thing as a "fair" price. Prices are negotiated, especially for pianos.

Anyway, OP's post was dripping with condescension. He may as well have asked why the Mona Lisa is worth so much money. After all it's just a bunch of canvas and paint. I can get the same thing at my local starving artist sale. And really - why is oil paint considered so good? Modern photolithograpy outperforms it in every possible way.

I'm stretching the analogy a bit but "supply and demand" answers both Norbert and OP. $150,000 for a piano is absurd for most indidividuals but it's peanuts for a big performance hall that might pull in tens or hundreds of thousands per night. Sometimes you need the very best you can get, regardless of cost.