Disklavier

Good afternoon, everyone.

In a message dated 1/6/04 11:57:48 AM, Spencer writes:


> Regarding the playing of music other than Yamaha's, I have to
> disagree. There is no excuse for not supporting standard MIDI
> conventions. It is unreasonable to expect everyone to make special
> versions of their music to work with the current and future models and
> their peculiarities. If Yamaha feels that they can produce better
> results with their own music by taking advantage of features of their
> system then that puts their music at an advantage and it should
> increase sales for them as long as their recordings are good in other
> respects. To design their systems to play other standard formats in an
> inferior way is manipulative and sleezy.
> 
I believe that Yamaha's implementation of MIDI in the Disklavier has 
completely conformed to standards and has, on occasion, led the industry in expanding 
those standards in a logical way.

(1) Note-on velocity
The biggest issue with playing back SMFs is the issue of the velocity profile 
of the instrument. Unfortunately, there are NO industry standards in this 
regard. Every non-acoustic keyboard must--by its electronic nature--work with a 
velocity profile that is totally artificial in its conception. In fact, many 
advanced MIDI keyboards even offer a variety of keyboard velocity profiles.

When you play an electronic keyboard or play a SMF on an electronic keyboard, 
if you think that the sound is too loud, you turn down the volume knob. If 
you think it is too soft, you turn up the volume, get more robust speakers, 
adjust the EQ, etc. In other words, people who use electronic keyboards also fuss 
with the velocity issue, too. 

However, people who use electronic keyboards are usually not listening to 
exposed piano playing with a great piano sample using great speakers with the 
expectation that they are going to hear the equivalent of someone playing live in 
their livingroom. In other words, the people in the electronic area of the 
MIDI world   have completely different expectations, and it is not surprising 
that their MIDI files do not match our instrument as well as we would like.

The problem is that when all of the thousands of people who author SMFs do 
their work, they are all working in totally different acoustical environoments. 
To make matters worse, many work with light action keyboards (which are even 
more removed from the concept of an acoustic piano), thin-sounding piano 
sample, and small speakers. So, they have a tendancy to keep boosting volume levels, 
both by generating high velocities and setting controller 7 to a high value. 
The problem is even more compounded when they try to get a piano track to 
stand out in an ensemble MIDI file.

In comparison, piano recordings made across the world by people playing on 
Disklavier are remarkably similar when played back on any other Disklavier. That 
is the result of the Disklavier's brilliant design that attempts to insure 
that the originally recorded velocities play back accurately.

No other reproducing piano system comes close to achieving these results.

(2) Pedals
In the early days of MIDI, the sustain and soft pedals (controllers 64 and 
67) on electronic keyboard instruments were simple on/off switches that 
generated values of 0 and 127. I don't know if Disklavier was the first instrument to 
implement controllers 64 and   67 as continuous controllers, but it was one of 
the early instruments to do so.

When makers of digital pianos got more sophisticated with their 
sound-processing capabilities, most or all of them started implementing the pedals as 
continuous controllers, too.

By comparison, PianoDisc and QRS record and playback only on/off pedals on 
all models and ignore the   soft pedal completely. (Of course, I may be unaware 
of recent changes to these products, and I am prepared to be corrected on this 
point.)

Although certain models of Disklavier respond only to on/off pedals, the 
on/off response has been implemented in a way that should have a certain 
smoothness to it. Loud thumping is definitely a reason to call Yamaha Piano Service if 
the local technician does not know what to do.

I cannot claim that all Disklavier models are completely devoid of mechanical 
noise, but I don't think that the normal level of noise should be a problem 
in most cases.

Regards,
PianoBench