Post pictures of your pianos here!

Seeker
Thanks! It's been a really fun project that combines my love of music and engineering.

I agree that the work of the best pianists concentrates on expression and control of note timing to an extreme degree- to my ear that makes a big difference to the musicality of a performance. Interesting to hear that Bosendorfer R&D was looking for ways to assist pianists to get those qualities.

Seeker
Sorry, I left out of my last message that I REALLY like your Bechstein- it's beautifully made! I'll look for your recordings- can't wait to hear it!

@Seeker and @sysadmindave thank you both for sharing the photos of your beautiful pianos! It’s fun to see them together actually, because I feel like they show the highest levels of the two kinds of piano beauty, a beautiful grand and beautiful upright.

Seeker The piece, your playing, and your piano all sound great. Thanks for your playing!

rogerch Thanks. It's a piece I never heard despite 55 hours on a DMA years back until I heard it in a Peter Feuchtwanger master class in Germany. ...glad to have the opportunity to share it here and anyplace people might forward it.

Seeker Please LMK what you think.

Wow, what a story! That is almost like finding an obscure masterpiece painting hidden in an attic somewhere! It's a beautiful piece and of course I don't need to comment on how it is played - anything except superlatives would be an insult Thanks for sharing Seeker!

sysadmindave

Heya, thanks so much for taking the time to tell your story. I'm honestly enthralled by this, and am equally in awe of your technical accomplishments as well as the beauty and rarity of such an instrument.

Wayne Stahnke's name comes up over and over again in the history of modern players, from Yamaha to Bosendorfer to Steinway. He's clearly the GOAT in the industry.

I remember seeing a comparison of several player systems, I believe it was Disklavier versus CEUS, noting strength/weaknesses such as millimeter-precision of keystrikes over long recording durations. Do you have any thoughts on how the SE, or other modern systems, fare in terms of reproduction? Are most systems "generally good enough where it's indistinguishable from the pianist sitting at the keys," or are there specifics where to your ears things are still noticeably imperfect? One of the things Frederic Chiu mentioned about the Disklavier Pro is that he thinks 256 levels of pedaling isn't quite enough (though that is definitely beyond the resolution of my own perception).

Fascinating topic and even moreso your story!

Gombessa
Thank you for asking and putting up with my wordy posts.

You're right, Wayne Stahnke is absolutely a renowned pioneer when it comes to modern player systems.

Local to me in the LA area is the Nethercutt Collection that houses what I believe is Wayne's first SE instrument made for a customer. The first Boesendorfer Wayne modified with his system in 1978 was done as a one-off commission from J.B. Nethercutt, the founder of Merle Norman cosmetics. It's a 290 Imperial, and sits next to the console of a Wurlitzer theatre organ that's built in to the music room at the museum. The museum itself is a fantastic place, FULL of super-high end classic cars and automated musical instruments- very well worth a visit if you're in the LA area.

As I understand it, when Wayne was engineering this system, he intended it to reproduce performances so exactly that the original pianist would accept it as their own authentic performance in every detail. He succeeded brilliantly at this and these instruments were and still are renowned for their accuracy of reproduction. Nearly all of the SE pianos made are still operating and in use in 2024. I only know of one 225 where the player system was removed and the piano sold without it after the owner's death. The Maestro foundation bought that player system separately to keep for spares.

When Wayne found out I was planning to purchase this piano, he very graciously reached out to me and generously offered his support to help me get it running again. I really appreciated that! Maestro has also been very supportive, so I thank them as well!

I think the paper you're referring to is the one that compared the reproduction of a 290SE with a Disklavier Mark IIXG. There is some interesting data in that paper, but I don't really agree with its overall conclusions on the SE- the authors seemed to have an ax to grind against player systems in general and were nitpicking tiny flaws that are absolutely inaudible- things like a several millisecond timing drift over the course of a playback.

As for player systems built since then, the Disklavier systems up until the Pro and current Enspire Pro systems were not able to accurately reproduce performances well enough to satisfy very critical listeners, but in general were reasonably good in their capabilities and succeeded in the marketplace. PianoDisc is in this same category.

CEUS and SE are generally considered to be about equivalent in reproduction, though there's some debate and no public data to support one or the other being better. The CEUS user interface is certainly much more modern though. I have heard from another SE owner that he believes the SE reproduction is superior to CEUS, but I don't have an opinion on it myself. I haven't heard enough of the CEUS systems to judge- they are also quite rare. The original Spirio sold by Steinway was the Wayne Stahnke LX playback-only system, though the newer Spirio R is distinct and its own design- Wayne wasn't involved with that. The LX system was based on a number of the SE design principles, but the goal was to be significantly lower cost and easier to install to address a different market segment.

Wayne was involved as a consultant in the development of Disklavier Pro.

The original SE system is still considered by many to be a high-water mark for reproducing piano accuracy. One thing that the SE and LX do in an interesting way is to calibrate the 'float' position of the damper pedal, where the dampers are raised to the point that the strings just start to ring but the pedal isn't completely depressed. That enables quite accurate half-pedaling reproduction even with just 256 levels of pedal- most of that range is lost either with the dampers on the strings or raised past the point of float, so I understand what Frederic Chiu was saying there. I don't know if Disklavier Pro systems calibrate the damper float point, but I suspect they don't.

The higher-end systems are all likely good enough these days to satisfy demanding listeners and artists. More ordinary systems (non-Pro Disklavier, PianoDisc, etc) have easily-audible limitations, but are still acceptable for nearly everyone. Not many will want a fully accurate concert fortissimo-level playback in their home, for example- a grand piano can get LOUD. Also, better accuracy is disproportionately expensive- chasing the last percentage points requires much more expensive components and more complex design. The high end reproducing systems are still quite costly and are likely to remain so.

There are definitely some technical limitations with the SE and other systems, but as an engineer I really appreciate the design philosophy that Wayne had of doing the very best that could be done with the technology of the time. In that way it appeals to me much as a classic car does, but he did such a good job that it remains competitive with the best even 37 years after my piano was built, and over 45 years from the original design. If engineered today many of the components could be much smaller and the software system could take advantage of today's computers (literally millions of times faster than the PC it came with), but otherwise there's not much to criticize. I'm working on the software angle!

Seeker
Very impressive playing and the resonant midrange tone of the Bechstein seems perfect for this music! This piece is also new to me, but you do it justice! Great sounding instrument!

brdwyguy PS is this a separate room in your home, I assume so?

Indeed it is. Our house was one of three "model homes" for our subdivision (my English friends call this an estate?). A carport was built up into a room, and it was used as the sales office, and that is the home of Kraus Piano Studio today. It is attached to the house, but I need to go outside to get into/out of it. There are some interesting details about the room, e.g., it has beautiful red tiles over concrete for the floor; it has a ceiling open to the roof vs a standard 8 foot ceiling, and until we replaced other windows in the house, it had the best windows of all until then, Anderson with wooden frames. What I have found very good are the lights- those are 1968 vintage fluorescent valences, and they give wonderful light. As the ballasts fail, I've replaced a few with electronic ballasts, and others I've converted to LED. In any event, they give shadowless light which is more than adequate for reading music (though I use a backlit tablet now). The white board idea came to me from a visit to the home of Elizabeth Vercoe, a composer I met at Boston University when I was an undergrad. She was married at the time to Barry Vercoe, another composer, and a brilliant guy who worked at MIT. In any event, they both had whiteboards in their home studios, and I guess that stuck with me.

Gombessa

Looking back through the history here, I notice your new Boesendorfer has the telltale box of a Disklavier pedal actuator on the lyre- what do you think of that reproducing system as employed on your piano?

Enspire Pro system, correct?

Love the lights, BTW- I also tend towards the techie decoration look, but my wife draws the line at the living room...

Gombessa I call that one the Mace Windu. And of course, you can do weirder stuff, too, if you opt for addressable RGBW segments rather than just single-color:

This looks like a cool night club and I can imagine Billy Joel playing the Piano Man Beautiful piano!

@Seeker that’s a wonderful piano studio!!

ShiroKuro that’s a wonderful piano studio!!

Thanks. If you're local, you're welcome to come see it. It's a space that evolved, originally from being just a junk room to what it is now over a 10+ year period. We originally had my Weber 208cm in the living room. During a floor refinishing project it went into the room that became the studio, and... I realized that was the best place for the music to happen. And so it began.

Seeker During a floor refinishing project it went into the room that became the studio, and... I realized that was the best place for the music to happen

That's wonderful!
Unfortunately, I'm not local to you