Mostly Piano, Not Pretender: Yamaha’s AvantGrand N2 a Year Later

Matt Peckham

A little over a year ago, I wrote about a piece of high-end musical gear made by Yamaha called an AvantGrand. It’s what Yamaha refers to as a hybrid piano, which just means that the intricate key mechanism that triggers the AG’s piano sounds is identical to that of an actual grand piano.

In any other non-acoustic piano, the action requires significant compromises to get everything to fit properly in something you can schlep around. In Kawai’s MP10, for instance — arguably the most piano-like stage instrument available today with an actual wooden-key action (RM3) that models escapement (“let off”) and has ivory-feel key surfaces — you’re still in a kind of mechanical uncanny valley. It’s the best digital piano action I’ve personally played (trumping, for me, even Roland’s V-Piano with PHA III), but even if you pair the MP10 with something like Synthogy’s dynamically more authentic Ivory II sample library, it’s still worlds away from what it feels like to physically play a full-blown acoustic.

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Not so the AvantGrand, where the mechanism replicates the experience of playing an acoustic action. In the mid-range, upright-like model I’ve been playing, the N2, it’s essentially the same action as the one Yamaha uses in its C1 Conservatory Classic Collection piano, a 5-foot, 3-inch grand that can go for upwards of $20,000. The N2's two piano samples — one softer, one brighter — are incredibly piano-like, taken from Yamaha’s own premium CFIIIS grand, a very pricey piano often compared to Steinway’s Model D. The AvantGrand’s piano samples play back through a unique four-channel speaker system positioned to resonate through the body of the instrument. Speaking of, since pianists expect to feel vibration through the keys of an actual acoustic, Yamaha employs a haptic vibration-feedback system calibrated to note frequencies (that is, lower notes vibrate more because the wavelengths are longer, higher notes less so), making it all but indiscernible from the feel of playing an actual acoustic.

It’s true, if you start plugging in the highest-end piano sample libraries for direct recording or running the AvantGrand through external speakers, you may prefer the fidelity of high-end piano sample libraries (no one knows how large the sample libraries are in the AvantGrand, for the record, though any looping seems to be masked when played through the internal speakers). This quickly becomes a question of aesthetic taste. Some people swear by certain piano sample libraries, others less so. Much of it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish, e.g. practicing, performing, recording, etc. Some of it’s just aesthetic preference: Even professional concert pianists rarely agree on which acoustic pianos produce the most desirable sounds.

Bear in mind that when I say the AvantGrand sounds “incredibly piano-like,” I just mean that in an acoustic space, listening, say, to Ivory II samples of a Yamaha C7 piano through studio monitors and contrasting that with the AvantGrand outputting through its own sophisticated multi-speaker system, I prefer the sound of the AvantGrand. It’s a question of sonic holism for me. The experience of listening to the AvantGrand or a high-end piano sample library through headphones is a different matter, though an important one if you’re thinking of using the AvantGrand as a stage piano.

Then again, unless you’re Chick Corea with a moving crew, you’re probably not bouncing out the door to a gig with a 300-pound monster-slab of wood and metal. There’s your downside. But the upsides are many, including: it’s always in tune, never has to be voiced (no hammers — it uses metal tips where the felt ones would be to trigger sensors), doesn’t require a humidistat because it doesn’t have a soundboard, has MIDI and USB connections and includes a headphones jack so you can play in the dead of night without disturbing a soul. Like any acoustic grand action, it does need to be regulated (to even things out — in a well-played piano, the action in the center, where your fingers spend most of their time, tends to loosen after years of play), but that’s it. In theory, it’s the perfect practice piano.

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I’ve been approached by musicians and music teachers over the past year who’ve wanted to know what I think of the AvantGrand as time’s gone by. Is it reliable? Has it broken down? Have I spent any money repairing it? Do I still like the sounds?

Before I answer, here’s the sort of play schedule I keep: I spend anywhere from a few hours a day (more on weekends) playing, often running through scales and arpeggios or doing Dohnányi exercises, working through battleship-gray stacks of Henle books and gradually expanding my jazz vocabulary. To keep my head in the acoustic game, I make a point of going out to play real acoustic grands and uprights at music stores (my favorite of late’s been an Estonian concert grand), the local university’s practice rooms and the homes of friends and relatives who have real pianos in various states of repair.

I’m not a concert pianist, so I tend to play a lot of mediocre grands and uprights. The world is full of mediocre pianos, of course, largely because people (or institutions like universities without climate-controlled practice rooms) don’t practice good maintenance. It can get expensive keeping a decent upright or grand in tip-top shape, tuning, regulating, voicing and humidifying things. It’s worth bearing that in mind when talking about something like the AvantGrand. What are we comparing it to? A perfectly maintained $50,000 to $100,000 piano or more of an entry-level acoustic grand?

The AvantGrand N2 sells anywhere from $8,000 to $10,000 depending on dealer discounts. While I’d argue it offers a reasonable approximation of what various higher-end pianos can do sound-wise, we shouldn’t get so tangled in the academic debate over sample fidelity that we forget where it slots price-wise. In the $8,000 to $10,000 range, what you’re getting is the best acoustic piano action money can buy (found in acoustics priced twice as much, and superior to any upright if you’re looking for a grand feel) with a piano sound reproduction system that rivals the best piano sample libraries if you’re thinking about it in holistic “just sitting in a room playing” terms.

As for reliability, I’ve had only one problem worth mentioning: Last winter, a few months after I bought the N2, I noticed the B-flat above middle-C making a kind of rasping sound (the action itself, not the sound system) after hammering on it for several minutes. It didn’t impact the dynamic nuance of that particular key (or the surrounding ones), it just sounded odd, mechanically. I made a few calls and had a tech ready to come over and investigate, but then it went away, inexplicably, and hasn’t resurfaced. My guess is it was just a “breaking in the key-bed” thing. Other than that, the N2's been rock solid.

For what it’s worth, the AvantGrand sits in my office, just behind the table I work at each day, and when I move to a bigger house, the AvantGrand will join me in an upstairs office, sequestered from the world, where it’ll be my practice piano. I’d still like to own something like that acoustic Estonian grand someday, once I’ve saved enough (you know, by the time I’m on my second post-human life in 2074 or something). In the meantime, for those of us without tens of thousands of dollars to blow on a sublime, fully acoustic instrument, the AvantGrand is the next best thing, and a remarkable achievement for the money.

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Matt Peckham is TIME's video games, science tech and music tech correspondent based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has appeared in Variety, The Washington Post, The New York Times and others.

Nitpicking The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim a Year Later

Bethesda

I reviewed Skyrim more than a year ago — I’d spent at least 50 hours roaming its lovely winter wilds. But I didn’t finish it, because what does “finishing” a game like Skyrim even mean? End credits? Cheering spectators? A celebratory cup of Gatorade?

Sure, I could have hightailed it to polish off what the strategy guide calls the “main quest,” but that seemed like a wrongheaded way to approach the mother of all “go anywhere, do anything” Western roleplaying games. Incidentally, that guide is over 650 pages (it’s in fact a strategy tome). The “main quest” is covered between pages 117 to 154 — all of 40 pages. The rest of the quests, by comparison, cover over 250 pages. Seeing all the game has to offer is analogous to reading all 10 of Steven Erikson’s Malazan books: a question of weeks, if not months, working round the clock.

So I chose to play the game peripatetically, hopping down this rabbit hole or that one, sometimes recruited by spontaneous conversation as I fraternized with Skyrim‘s passerby, sometimes working off my quest dossier, often wandering just to see what a distant part of the map looked like or what the light spilling off the side of some foothill was. And then I stopped, because that’s life (and other games were calling).

Over the holiday break I had a rare four-day block of time to game uninterrupted, so, perhaps unwisely, I chose to have another go at Skyrim from scratch. Okay, “chose” is misleading. What actually happened was, when I moved my old Xbox 360 save games into the cloud, some of my Skyrim data disappeared. Whoopsie-doodle. But okay, I was looking for an excuse to revisit places like Bleak Falls Barrow and Ustengrav — to make that sublimely cool first pilgrimage up to High Hrothgar one rime-riddled step at a time.

And so I did. At this point I’ve made it back to level 32 — two levels higher than I’d managed the last time around. I’m still roughly 40 levels behind my brother, who’s apparently now slaying elder dragons with ease, but I’m through the game’s second act and most of the guild quests. I’ve found 50 skill books and finished 10 side quests, built three wings in a house courtesy Hearthfire, found 13 standing stones, discovered 100 locations, had a bounty of 1,000 in nine holds (and paid it all down), picked 50 locks and 50 pockets, and even started poking around Solstheim, the island near Morrowind you explore in Skyrim‘s third and most recent expansion. No Skyrim doyens, I’m not bragging. I know how far I have to go. I’m eyeing 1,550 out of 1,550 achievement points, too.

But I’ve also clocked another 71 hours according to my latest savegame, which makes for a total of over 120. Time to nitpick a little, because I’ve said plenty of nice things about Skyrim already! (I realize some of these complaints may be addressable in the PC version with mods, so think of this as a gripe piece aimed more at console players.)

Everyone but you hates money in this game. Who tucks trifling amounts of cash in random barrels around town or in funeral urns miles beneath the surface? Hey beggar-dude bothering me for a gold piece, go poke around the city’s odds and ends — free money! Why do I seem to be the only guy in all Skyrim making money looting the furnishings anyway? And what are zombie-skeletons doing carrying gold around (what are they carrying it in)? At least the wild animals (bears, foxes, rabbits, wolves, etc.) don’t have cash wallets for a change, so there’s that.

The weather inside is frightful. It’s kind of a mood-killer, standing under a roof or an overhang, or inside a ruin, watching particles of snow or drops of rain pour right through whatever’s overhead. It’s been an issue since Arena. What would it cost in development time to fix in whatever’s next?

All the world’s an ice-skating rink. Skyrim uses its own “Creation” game engine, but poking around the interwebs, I gather it’s just an updated version of the Gamebryo-Havok-SpeedTree mashup used in Oblivion. I’m not complaining: the game world’s gorgeous! But as in Oblivion, it often feels like you’re skating over the landscape instead of sticking to it. You don’t notice it so much in first-person mode (well, except for that fact that you’re a legless floating torso), but it’s glaringly obvious when you bump up against incline changes slightly higher than a single stair-step and get stuck, running in place like you’re jogging on an invisible treadmill.

Speaking of, why can’t I climb anything? Play Skyrim, then Assassin’s Creed III, then come back to Skyrim and you’ll see what I mean. Why can’t I pull myself onto a ledge that’s shorter than I am? Dangle off the edges of things Uncharted-style? Climb down carefully instead of leaping/tumbling over? How can you be a proper sneak-thief if you can’t scale the side of a structure, clamber over the shingles to a second- or third-floor balcony, then pick the lock on a window? I get that none of this is part of the world design in Skyrim, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was?

Difficulty, schmifficulty. I tried Skyrim on “Master” the first time around, but all that does is crank up the enemy damage done to you (and wind down how much you do to enemies). Translation: death-by-a-thousand-papercuts battles. The second time through I settled for “Adept,” which is Bethesda’s definition of balanced, but now I’m decimating everything with a handful of blows. I’d love to see adjustable difficulty that changes enemy behavior in interesting ways instead of artificially raising or lowering health and damage outlay.

Logic, schmogic. At some point Skyrim‘s heightened “realism” starts to work against it. It’s a hypothetically several-hundred-hour game, after all — plenty of time to mull over design choices you’d brush past in other games. Take dungeons. Isn’t it natural in a game stuffed with this much lore to wonder who installed the triple-axe-blade-swinging traps? Why the axe blades haven’t rusted or the contraption busted? Why you’re the first adventurer to pretty much stroll through and clean house? Why the quest objects are always at the end of the dungeon? Why there’s always an “escape hatch” waiting to trip you back to the surface?

“Call me butterfingers…” Putting stuff back as it was before you picked it up or knocked it over is next to impossible, say a soul gem in a chalice, a vase on a table or a book in a stack. You’re the clumsiest hero in the world with just three moves: throw, drag or drop. I don’t need a whole game based around precision object manipulation, but it’s kind of annoying running into the same shops and seeing the same stuff you accidentally knocked over, lying where it fell hundreds of game-days ago, knowing there’s nothing you can do to tidy up short of filching it.

Pathfinding issues blah blah yada yada. Your followers seem to hate actually following you. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could keep track of where everyone was on your map? One minute your companions are chugging along behind, the next they’re gone, distracted by something like a pack of wolves or getting flambéed by a dragon. Getting Maurice to follow me cross-country for “The Blessings of Nature” quest was like pulling teeth!

Sometimes Skyrim isn’t a game at all. Let’s end with a compliment: The last time I saw cloud-capped mountains and cascading sunsets this beautiful I was in Lucerne hiking the Swiss Alps. Sometimes you just want to admire the scenery in a game like this, following a subterranean river over boulders, past weird glowing mushrooms as the river meets an underground waterfall and the two flow over a precipice lit by mote-filled beams of sunlight that’s falling through a crack from somewhere above. There’s no “game” there, you’re just appreciating the awesomeness of where you are and the majesty of what you’re looking at.

Matt Peckham is TIME's video games, science tech and music tech correspondent based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His work has appeared in Variety, The Washington Post, The New York Times and others.