WNAMM09: Yamaha's New Grand Moves Air

US Avant Grand has transducers and 4, 3way speakers 24/01/09

No flash plug

7:15 mins

Buying Choices

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It's a terrible dilemma, you'd love to put a Yamaha CF3 grand piano in your lounge, but you don't have the room, or perhaps the budget ($160k+/-), so what do you do? Well you could go for a nicely presented home keyboard piano type of affiar, but that might just not float your boat. The new Yamaha Avant Grand might well fit the bill, sure it's still mighty pricey at around $19,999, but it's a real playing experience. With four sets of three way speakers that take their signals from the four channel samples, they call it the Spatial Acoustic Speaker System, custom made for this instrument from the aforementioned C3S concert grand. So what? You might ask, well there's more - the Avant Grand, which has a beautiful laquered, grand piano finish and Ivory 2 key tops, is also stuffed with transducers which cause the piano to actually vibrate in sympathy using the Tactile Response System which transmits "string" vibrations through the keys to player's hands. In practice it's very authentic, turn the speakers down and play one of the lower octaves and you can actually feel the keys vibrate in sympathy â€“ and makes the experience pretty real. If you doubt me, get your hands on one and give it a try. The AvantGrand ships July 2009. You'll be pleased to know that it comes with a matching bench.