Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Digital Pianos - Electronic Pianos - Synths & Keyboards WSJ article on N2

+1 for cat.

Make that +2. The look on the cat's face is priceless.

Imagine, for example, that you come from a country where everyone has been marketed to non-stop since the late 'sixties - to the point where you're not even aware of it and are openly hostile to anyone who anyone who merely broaches the subject. That should get you in the PW forum zone.

I doubt that Yamaha would want someone to endorse the N2 over the N3.

Interestingly, I've noticed that the two N3s I've played seemed to have a lighter touch than the two N2s I've tried (one of which I own). Never seen any information suggesting that there would be a difference in the action but this might partly explain the preference of Ms. Dinnerstein.

And is the idea that marketing in our cultures went unnoticed and unrecognized until, mirabile dictu, a couple of savants on this thread discovered it for the very first time and brought this wisdom to light for the benefit of the rest of the previously ignorant world?

I am grateful that, on the topic of marketing, a few here have shared with us some penetrating glimpses into the perfectly obvious. More so for Plinky's photo, though. That was good.

The "stoned neighborhood" you allude to actually sounds a lot like great swaths of Baltimore or D.C. where generation upon generation of kids of the wrong color or wrong side of the tracks have turned to drugs in a desperate, dead-end attempt to escape the nefarious consequences of de facto apartheid.

The "everyone", however, sounds like hyperbole.

If you were insinuating that Amsterdam might be filled with stoners, you were only partially correct: there are indeed many, many stoners here at any one time. But, most of these stoners are tourists from North America and other countries briefly experiencing what freedom tastes like.

The Dutch themselves actually use dramatically less of almost any (illicit) drug you can name than Americans. This includes the, in comparison to alcohol, relatively harmless soft drug Cannabis which, for all practical purposes, has been completely non-criminalized for public purchase and consumption by adults 16 years or older during the past decades. If you are free to choose to drink and toke responsibly (or not) since your teenage years, then you learn how to be free and to be a responsible adult rather than to learn to be hypocritical, to lie and to be a drug abuser and a law breaker.

At the same time, nasty drugs such as Meth, which are abused by millions of hopeless Americans suffering from poverty, ignorance and the complete absence of hope for any kind of humane future, are virtually unknown here. Not to mention all the deaths from horribly addictive presecription drugs pushed by Big Pharma in the US where these officially sancitoned and franchised drug pushers may shamelessly propagandize the population through manipulative television advertising and corrupt pay-for-play pusher agreements with doctors, lead to tens and tens of thousands of tragic overdose deaths per year in the US. Another self-inflicted problem which is also virtually unknown here.

Funny thing about that...trust, education, culture, a focus on rationality and critical thinking, a healthy democracy of the people rather than corrupt clientelism purchased by the almighty dollar, regulated markets, an independent judiciary, an independent free press, broadly protected human rights, true freedom for individuals, protections for minorities and equality of opportunity...all these together always seems to lead to fewer problems, not more.

Something to keep in mind during the next time you "vote".

So you don't think a discussion of what motivates the creation of an article, or the people featured in said article, in a magazine that subsists almost solely on advertising money, is germane to this thread?

Shouldn't you be on an A.M. radio station somewhere????

Well, I myself used to belong to the previously ignorant world, for not that many years, getting informations solely out of the specs of manufacturers + ADs. Would such a discussions have opened up my eyes earlier, it could have saved much time and some money for me.

Interestingly, while some contributors here (including You) obstinately deny or defend the manipulative nature and power of marketing machinery, you are talking now from the "perfectly obvious".

Amazing. A poster takes note of a piano review in the Wall Street Journal ... and the thread degenerates into a soapbox forum on marketing, politics, and drug use.

Do not forget about the cat please...

I agree, it is amazing. In all these years no thread at PW has ever deviated even slightly from the OP subject.

Call the WSJ, someone on the internet is wrong!

Well, I don't get what is this all about. By reading the article (btw quite superficial), I just see a concertist having a quick glance at some DPs, not very well selected if we attend to what is commonly spoken here, perhaps due to an even quicker and careless work of easy journalism.
This is very typical and should not cause such arguments. Hey, some of you are pissing out the flowerpot.
This is about pianos, remember?

And now a musicians joke: doublebass choruses are like lightnings; you never know where is it gonna strike, the much it will last and the damages it will cause.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Manufacturers and retailers of consumer products often manage category and assortment structures using consumer decision making logic and according to the so-called "rule of three". The rule of three often provides a consumer with three choices: top of the line but expensive, cheap but with limitations and something in the middle which is often at a sweet spot in profitability. The real money in the AG line may be in selling as many N2s as possible. If Yamaha had first introduced the N1, then the N2 and finally the N3 they may have sold practically no N3s at all...

Yes. I agree that is what it looks like: quick, casual, unofficial, believable, not-seriously-journalistic, personal and with an appeal to an apparently independent authority figure: all the things that a paid, display advertisement -- the kind that tend to get more and more ignored and less and less bought these days -- is not.

As an everyday example: global brand management at Heineken pays tens of millions of dollars for Heineken to feature "coincidentally" in blockbuster films such as the new James Bond franchise. At the end of the day you buy a $12 movie ticket to be marketed to for an hour and a half in one long product placement advertisement...

Maybe you are right, I'm not into commercial tricks. Now, what I recall for some old psicophysical experiment on perception (about so called "phi" phenomenon):
Some people are looking to a STILL point of light projected on a black board. They are alone in the room. No matter their age, sex, race, ideology or whatever, they all see the point slightly moving as seconds go by. Seems that our brain can't conceive such still, or frameless, point, and then it "gives" it some slow motion (left or right, up or down)in order to "understand" it or, better said, give it some sense .
If this things happen when looking at a point of light, what could our brain do with a review!

Exactly; in the store where I bought my AG from the N2s were apparently already outselling the N3s by a significant margin. I assume that this could be the case elsewhere too and that Yamaha does not need help in market segmentation of these products given the different pricing / form factor between the models. All the more reason to doubt that Yamaha would seriously want (let alone pay) a professional pianist to say that the flagship model - with all the brand prestige associated with it - is inferior to the other models in the range. However, I do think the rationale behind her preference of the N2 is interesting regardless of the nature of the article.

I've said this several times, if Yamaha had introduced the N1 (or even the NU1) first, I would have probably bought two of them instead of buying the N3. (I do like the look of the N3 and since it is placed in my living room and not in a studio, looks do count for something.)

Fortunately, while I count my pennies, I'm not really poor, that plus what the dealer allowed me for my GranTouch 1 made the choice for me to trade up to the N3 a no brainer.

One drawback for the N2 is the speaker grill which is at the perfect height for my cat.

That's a laugh! No citizen of the European Union is free - we are all living in the quagmire of over-regulation and nanny state "social democracy" - currently being fashioned by the German Chancellor in fact (but this time with financial leverage, not military power).

We in the United Kingdom, who are denied the opportunity to vote on our membership of the most undemocratic, unaccountable institutions rife across the EU (because our leaders wouldn't like the result), gave up all our freedoms when we joined the whole sorry mess.

So don't lecture us all about the tragedies of (a fragment of) American life. No place is perfect, certainly not continental Europe. Ask the Spanish, the Irish, the Greeks and Cypriots how much they are enjoying their "European style" freedoms at the moment...

If we could jettison the whole sorry lot of whinging Brits and let the UK buy itself out of the EU to become the next American state, I'm sure that everyone concerned would be quite happy. Certainly getting rid of one more den of thieves and having London & New York be merged into "one big bad bank city" would be good for world stability.