[pianotech] Yammy GH1

[Ron Nossaman]

> Which would be too bad since a small piano isn't condemned to sounding bad,
> it just takes a bit of thinking.  Why they settle for these scale design
> sacrifices is a mystery.  
> 
> David Love
> www.davidlovepianos.com



> I wonder if these small grands is where entry level scale designers cut 
> their teeth.
> Tom Cole


Entry level scale designers? Uh, no.

Not much that Yamaha does can be called arbitrary, nearly as I 
can tell. They have multiple decimal place reasons for 
anything they do. building lousy student designs by the tens 
of thousands wouldn't be a very good fit to the rest of their 
marketing practices. The only thing I have come up with that 
makes any sense at all (to me, at least) is this: It was 
pointed out to me many years ago that you can't sell one of 
anything. If you have two, a buyer will have the illusion of 
choice, and you'll sell one of them. Having a nasty cheap item 
to contrast with a much nicer expensive item means you'll sell 
more of the expensive items than if you didn't have the, nasty 
one beside it for contrast. Even when the customer fails by 
buying the nasty item, Yamaha wins because they made a sale, 
and the customer who bought the nasty item wouldn't have 
bought the expensive one in any case. So by having a few of 
those little horrors in the floor, they sell more of the 
better instruments, and they also sell a bunch of the nasties 
as well. If the nasties were better sounding instruments, 
they'd sell more of the cheap nasties and fewer of the better 
instruments, for a net revenue loss. You can bet they have 
percentage figures somewhere in the corporate file cabinets.
Ron N