Disklavier

At the NAMM Convention here in Anaheim, CA today, Yamaha showed 
prototypes of its new Disklavier "Mark IV" pianos (called
"D4" in the signs we saw).  Yamaha's Service Manager,
Bill Brandom, walked us through the technical details, and crawled 
under the new grands with us.  Since I didn't see a press release
on Yamaha's Web site, I thought I'd report briefly what we
saw. I'm sure Yamaha will supply extensive details soon (and
correct any mistakes I've made here).

Hard drive and I/O: I've been pretty vocal on this forum about
the fact that 1.44M is just too small for recording extended recitals 
on Pros in high-resolution.  Blessedly, the D4 control unit has an 
80GB hard drive!  In addition, there's a new USB port and LAN
connection for getting files in and out.  The control unit will be 
running the Linux operating system.

User interface: The user interface to the D4 control unit is a color 
PDA that can sit in a cradle.  It communicates with the main control 
unit via wireless Wi-Fi.  There is a small unit that sits under the 
front of the grand's keyboard, housing the CD drive and diskette 
drive, but it has just a few buttons on it – unlike the many
buttons on the Mark III control unit.  It has a nice black cover that 
you can close when it's not in use.  The main guts (with the hard 
drive) sit much farther back under the soundboard.

Hammer measurements: The hammer sensors have been improved in an 
amazing way.  If you look at how hammer velocity and angles are 
measured on a Mark III, you'll see a little metal "U." 
The new hammer sensor is a tiny piece of clear film that has a gray-
scale curve on it (kinda hard to describe).  As the hammer moves up, 
the sensors can measure the continuous movement through the gray-
scale, from clear to dark.  Look for the potential for way more 
recording accuracy.  Bill showed us the continuous hammer measurement 
on some internal-use software ("MIDI Check").

Pedal: In addition, there's been at least one more bit of
accuracy added for the pedals (from 7 bits to 8 bits).  I guess that 
means each pedal movement may result in 2 MIDI events, instead of 
one.  Visually, the black unit that holds the pedal pistons on the D4 
grands is much smaller than that in the Mark III.

These were prototype grands; the real D4s will ship "in
summer."  These improvements show a tremendous commitment by
Yamaha's engineering team to iterative refinement of an already-
excellent system.  Our software company, Zenph Studios, writes 
software for Disklavier Pros – we're delighted to see the
ongoing improvements.  Welcome to the 21st century!

- John Q.