Hi folks. Having just been to the Yamaha Acadamies GP and Masters courses this past few months in Hamamatsu, I'm rather familiar with what the Acadamy folks expect from one of their grands. And a C7 is one of their better offerings so I expect they'd be rather picky about most things. Saturday and yesterday I had the opportunity to open one of these up on the floor of the local dealer, something I havent done much of since my Sherman and Clay days in Seattle, and I was really shocked at the amount of prep work needed to get this thing operative. We are talking about 15 hours solid prep work to come reasonable close to concert regulation, tuning, and voiceing. No way this was carefully voiced in the remotest sense of the word. They just dont get that uneven and remain so harshly bright from sitting in the box for a while. Regulation... from the bottom up absolutely everything had to be re-done... starting with all 88 keys binding rather severly on the balance rail pin. Something rather sticky had been used on the inside of the keypin holes... looked like it was some kind of a graphiting by the color... but it was anything but slick. Never could get that nice slow fall glide a key should show when you lift it up a bit and let it climb back down the keypin. Even with a good deal of protek. Glide bolts were way out of whack, treble showed 66 mm key to keybed, bass showed 63, and the hidden glide bolt in the bass was turned all the way up... floating as it were. Hammers very poorly alligned, letoff and drop all over the place... you shoulda seen the drop line... etc etc etc... the whole regulation needed redoing. I dont even want to talk about the voicing. Point is that Yamahas had a rep for being really good out of the box some years back. According to this dealer this present example is not uncommon.... seems to me Yamaha must be slipp'n then. 15 hours of prep work is a lot to ask of a dealer. They gotta pay somebody to do this, and that cuts right into their profit. Was curious to know if others are experiencing the same in other parts of the world. Cheers RicB
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