Hi Jean, What you're referring to is called "latency." It can be troublesome at times even on the best of synthesizers and electronic keyboards. Anywhere you have wires being run through electronic components or MIDI controller/slave situations, you'll have some latency, although sometimes it's not very noticeable. I think their best bet is to only play a piano like this in very large halls with lots of reverb. That way the "chorus" effect you'd get with the latency problem would sound perfectly fine! :-) Regards, Rob McCall On Jan 03, 2011, at 06:36 , vdr jean wrote: > Hi, > > I am not a piano technician (wish I were...) but I don't think the coupling of the two keyboards ( sensors on one commanding solenoids on the other) would work and be unnoticed. I have a disklavier and real-time midi (or whatever) is quite impossible without a noticeable delay, because the software has to compensate for the delay due to differences in midi velocity. That is : the timing and speed (ie volume or midi velocity) of the "reproduced" note depends on how fast the key is moved. If for example you would play simultaneously a FF note and a PP one, the timing recorded would be the same, but on the reproducing piano, the software has to compensate it by pressing the PP note a little sooner so that both "bottoms of the keys" - and thus hammer strike - will be reached simultaneously. A disklavier (or solenoid piano as such) doesn't react like a synthesizer or sampler keyboard : those can go lightning fast, and synchronize easily because they deal with electronics only. The only limit is the accumulation of midi delays and that's 2ms each. But on a disklavier you have a real action, very slowly reacting compared to a mere " estimate time and velocity" sensor. The yamaha sensors, for example, will detect the speed of the individual hammer a few millimeters from the strike point. Then the software has to compute the exact timing of the "pressing the key", depending on the hammer's speed (this delay being smaller with fff notes...) > Am I right or could there be a way to do what I was unable to do with my disklavier and master keyboard - that is having a musician hidden somewhere playing the master keyboard connected to the disklavier, and so having the disklavier onstage, "magically" accompanying a spectator singing whatever he or she would like, and reacting "live" with the public ?... > > Jean Debefve
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