[ Steve Marx wrote in 090910 MMDigest:

> What makes the disc player appealing?  Is it that paper rolls
> are getting harder to find?

Steve, you bring up several subjects that are of interest to many of us.

1) Building up a fine library of rolls, original or recut, takes a lot
of money and space and not all the Duo-Art, Welte or Ampico rolls are
available.

Let one thing go wrong with the tracking of an original piano system
and the roll is often destroyed and the edges frayed and torn beyond
repair.  They also require good storage conditions if they are to
survive.

Spencer Chase offers a CD with now some 5,000 reproducing piano titles
on it.  One lousy little CD has all this music on it!  No more jumping
up every five minutes to change the roll.  One can assemble suites of
music in custom files and the piano plays all day with what you want to
hear.  Great for dinner parties.

2) The old solenoid piano systems like the Pianomation and Yamaha had
a problem with the basic physics of what was playing the keys.

A pneumatic is strongest when it is fully open, while the solenoid is
strongest when it almost at the end of it's stroke.  The old solenoid
pianos would often not play all the notes when set for soft background
playing.  I almost got thrown out of a restaurant once for upping the
volume on an early Disklavier piano that was missing half the notes and
was badly messing up the music.

Only when Wayne Stahnke developed his LX player was this problem
addressed and solved.  As I was told, he varies the voltage from the
beginning of the solenoid stroke to the end, accurately reproducing the
movement speed and intensity of a pneumatic.  You can also custom wind
a solenoid coil to achieve the same thing.  Most if not all of the old
solenoid piano makers bought their solenoids and they were not wound to
do this.  The cheap approach as usual.

One is often much better off using a top end digital piano played from
a small laptop computer and not one of the earlier solenoid pianos.
They are surprisingly good now.

3) Remember that an original pneumatic piano can really only play two
expressions, "Theme" and "Accompaniment," with limited single note
expression by use of the intensity valve or crash valve, whereas the
LX can play individual note expression in a chord, if that is what the
pianist wants.

4) The LX also has a huge number of expression levels (1020) as
compared to any pneumatic reproducing piano.  This goes for the soft
pedal too (256).  That makes a big difference in the sound.  It also
has a high sample rate (800 samples per second) and that too helps
a whole lot.  As a professional concert pianist that I know said after
listening to an LX equipped grand piano, "Well, you sure don't need to
do any better, this plays better than I do."

Technology has marched forward and we have to acknowledge this.

Jim Crank