Disklavier

I am a piano technician who fell in love with
electronic player pianos when they were first invented
in the early 1980's.  My first one was a Pianocorder
Vorsetzer that used 80 pinball machine solenoids and a
Marantz propriety cassette deck.  You could roll this
thing up to any piano, connect the pedal rods to the
top of of the pedals, and have digitized player piano
rolls on cassettes play your piano. Yamaha bought this
company and the Pianocorder became no more.  I still
have my Vorsetzer and the library of cassette tapes!

MIDI was invented in the early 80's, but every company
had their own version.  Yamaha's version was called
ESEQ and that was the software that ran the first
Disklaviers, the Wagon Grand and the MX100A/B. The
solenoid technology was better than the old pinball
machines, and laser beams broken by shutters were used
to measure hammer and key travel.

It wasn't until about 1986 that a standard was agreed
upon, and General MIDI came about.  Yamaha came out
with the MarkII that could play standard MIDI format 0
files as well as their own ESEQ stuff.

Then flash memory was invented.  This made software
upgradable by using a floppy disk instead of having to
replace a chip on the motherboard.  The MarkIIXG not
only could play standard MIDI files in format 0, but
format 1 as well.  The XG MIDI sounds were the next
generation of MIDI sounds as pioneered by Yamaha.  They
also had incremental pedaling.

Then "pulsating" solenoids were invented and they
appeared on the MarkIII.  Personally, I think one of
the greatest musical inventions of the 20th century was
the transposable audio that came with the MarkIII.  You
could play a CD with your piano and adjust the pitch of
someone singing!  The MarkIII could play MIDI 0 and 1,
plus digital audio, plus it STILL played the ESEQ files
that had been invented years earlier.  It's like having
Microsoft Office still supporting my Commodore 64 I
bought in 1985!  Also with the MarkIII came the piano
action special "jacks" that enable silent playing
without affecting the touch on your fingers.

With a DSR-1 control box and the DCD1  CD player
(hardware upgrades), you can upgrade any Disklavier to
most of the capabilities of the MarkIII.

Now we have the MarkIV that uses different solenoids
that were previously only available in the PRO models,
different operating system (Lynux), uses a PDA for a
remote controller, but it STILL plays the old ESEQ
floppy disks!  The recordings create twice as much data
as the older systems, so it has a hard drive instead of
a floppy disk.  It can also control the loudness and
softness of the piano playing better than any previous
models. Most of this is hardware, so you would have to
gut your Disklavier electronics and start from scratch
to upgrade to MarkIV electronics.  This is not going to
happen.

We have come a long way from pinball machine solenoids,
and only the Yamaha Disklavier will give you really
good quality recordings.  The QRS Patine system, and
the PianoDisc are now incorporating copy protection
systems that are a total pain to deal with.  How would
like to find out your old library of expensive music no
longer plays on the current product??  At least Yamaha
never did that to you!

Carol Beigel