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!
