Piano shopping...
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We want to replace the Kawai upright we have in our living room by something better. The Kawai is too loud (it's 51" / 130cm) for that room, and the sound is too squishy.
I was thinking something in the 47"/120cm range, with better quality. I'm open to used pianos, too.
I tested a few pianos today. I can preclude the entire Yamaha and Kawai range of upright pianos. One piano I liked is the Schimmel K122. I also tried a couple of Sauter pianos, but I found them to be too bright.
Next I want to try the Bechstein brands, Bechstein and Hoffmann. The best upright I ever played was a Bechstein Concert 8, but that one's both too big and too expensive. Bösendorfer and Steinway also make upright pianos that blow away many grand pianos, but I don't want to spend 40K on an upright piano.
Other brands I want to try: Blüthner, used Ibach (which used to be a high quality German brand), Förster, Grotrian, Steingräber.
Thoughts? What's the best upright one can get, say, for 15 or 20 grand at most?
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@LuFins-Dad doesn't know as much as me on the topic, so I want to let him handle this one for practice.
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The Schimmel is nice. I haven't played a Seiler in a while, but I recall liking those as well...
Out of curiosity, did you try the Yamaha YUS series? Availability might be very limited.
Me/rry/Christmas
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@lufins-dad said in Piano shopping...:
Out of curiosity, did you try the Yamaha YUS series? Availability might be very limited.
Tried one today, actually. It was a nice piano, but couldn't compete with the Schimmel. I think the market here is a little different. I believe most Americans buy a grand piano for that kind of money. Over here, people are more likely to prefer a high quality upright, hence dealerships have plenty of them.
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It’s always something.
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OK, I've now boiled it down to two pianos.
It's either going to be a 2009 Bechstein Classic 124, or a 2012 Grotrian Classic 124.
I like the sound of the Grotrian a little better - it has a cleaner more delicate tone - but the Bechstein would be significantly cheaper, and it's also a killer piano. My brain says Bechstein but my gut says Grotrian.
This has been an interesting piano search, with some surprises:
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I tried two August Förster pianos, which are often described as a kind of hidden gem. They were a total disappointment to me. These weren't obsessively bad pianos, but nothing special either.
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Steingräber pianos are really nice, but I don't understand why they charge significantly more than other premium makers.
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The lower-prized Bechstein pianos ("Academy") are nice pianos, but not nearly in the same league as the "full" Bechstein line. Their second line, Hoffmann, is nice, but not necessarily better than a good Yamaha, for instance.
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Biggest surprise: Petrof. I remember trying a couple of Petrofs a decade ago, and I wasn't impressed at all. Very unrefined sound and feel. But the Petrof 131 I tried today was phenomenal at that prize point. It's not the kind of sound I was looking for, but for less than 15K or so you get a quality that isn't quite at the same level but amazingly close to the likes of the big Bösendorfer or Bechstein uprights, which are in the 40K region. A real powerhouse.
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Yamaha's upright range doesn't have anything that even remotely plays in the same league as Grotrian/Bechstein/Bösendorfer.
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I stumbled upon a couple of Ibachs. I can now see why they went bankrupt.
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@klaus said in Piano shopping...:
OK, I've now boiled it down to two pianos.
It's either going to be a 2009 Bechstein Classic 124, or a 2012 Grotrian Classic 124.
I like the sound of the Grotrian a little better - it has a cleaner more delicate tone - but the Bechstein would be significantly cheaper, and it's also a killer piano. My brain says Bechstein but my gut says Grotrian.
I suspect affordability is not really an issue for you in this case, so go with your gut. Your brain is smart enough to amortize the price difference over the N number of years you expect to hear the piano and come up with a "it's only x Euro per day" argument to rationalize the gut's choice.
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It's about a 4K prize difference between the Bechstein and the Grotrian. I've managed to rationalize about half of that prize difference with considerations that are still somewhat rational (age of the instruments, amount of required prep work, differences in list prize when new etc.). For the remaining 2K, I'd have to resort Orwellian self-deception measures. I'll read the "How many fingers am I holding up" scene again for some inspiration.
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"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
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@klaus said in Piano shopping...:
OK, the dealer managed to bridge another 1K of the gap, and I pulled the trigger.
This is the baby.
Nice!
