Disklavier

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to spend some time with a Mark IV 
running software version 1.14.

I tried playing several Pianosoft Plus Audio CDs.  I was impressed by the
incremental improvement in playback accuracy over the Mark II and Mark III
series but was extremely disappointed in the response time of the Mark IV
in navigating CD tracks.  Regardless of whether I used the front panel
buttons or the PRC-100 remote, it took on the order of 12-15 seconds to
start playback or switch tracks.  I was particularly surprised to find
that I could not jump forward a few tracks by quickly pushing the "next
track" button several times.

I've heard that Yamaha instructs dealers to dismiss the slowness of the UI
as the piano being "deliberate" or "precise", but I found it
objectionable.  In high-tech gadgetry such as MP3 players, DVD players and
the Disklavier, any UI delays longer than 2 seconds make the product feel
sluggish, even if its performance is otherwise very impressive.
 
The Mark IV was side by side with a playback-only Mark III, which was
MUCH, MUCH faster at navigating a CD.  It responded much more like a
traditional CD player, instantly acknowledging my track change requests on
the display, with playback of the selected track starting within 2-3
seconds.

I have a theory on why the Mark IV is slower:

I noticed that on the Mark III, the LCD on the control unit does not 
display the song title until you start to play a song.

But on the Mark IV, the piano tries to display the song title for each
song even when playback is stopped and the user is just changing tracks.

The process of reading the song titles involves actually playing the first
few seconds of the CD track at normal speed (without operating the piano),
since the song title is encoded as a SYSEX message within the first few
seconds of MIDI data.

I could be wrong, but it seems like once the Mark IV starts looking for
the title within a CD track, it continues until it either finds the title
or times out.  This operation apparently isn't permitted to be interrupted
by a user request to switch tracks.  Therefore, each track change
operation takes a while, since the Mark IV has got to find the title
before it will accept the next user request.

If this is indeed the problem, it should be easy to fix, and I hope Yamaha
will consider improving this behavior in the next software release.

Mark Fontana