Disklavier

Hi All
Throwing in my experiences with DKV hammer sensors, I have to agree with
Robert Welcyng that their maladjustment will affect reproduction. When I
purchased my second hand MkII C7 DKV, it was woeful in all respects. A
piano technician fixed the piano, but the DKV was horrible. The overall
level was far too loud, the volume level varied between keys, and it was
impossible to make it play as well as the PianoDisc I had sold to purchase
the instrument.

After lots of time and phone calls, I discovered the reason for the
problems. The hammer sensors had been adjusted by a technician in
accordance with the DKV manuals. That is, adjust the height of the sensors
so a "beep" is heard when the hammer is 2mm from the strings.
Unfortunately, what Yamaha forgot to tell us is that it's the SECOND beep,
not the first. As a result, the best the technician could get was a setting
of 5mm from the strings.

Once I discovered the trick, it only took a few hours of adjusting and
finetuning to get the instrument back to playing in its usual superb way. I
now regularly test the 2mm setting, and also manually finetune the minimum
velocity setting for each note.

I would have thought the hammer sensor position would also affect
recordings. I'm most interested to hear the views of others on this. I
realise that hammer sensors are only fitted to some instruments, so perhaps
they don't contribute to recording, just reproduction.

Peter Phillips
Padstow, Australia
From Peter Phillips, Electronic Editorials NSW. Phone (02) 9773 4734,
mobile 0418 407 607, fax (02) 9773 9943. Website at
http://members.optushome.com.au/eleced/index.htm