Why does this remind me of Vonnegut's Player Piano?  I guess piano tuners are now on the endangered heap of history.

This is AMAZING.

<A few years ago, Yamaha tried a crazy experiment. What if it produced a grand piano that was traditional in almost every respect — except that it replaced strings with sensors? What if the sound came from painstakingly recorded audio snippets, or samples, of each string from a $120,000 top-of-the-line grand piano, reproduced through a set of high-end speakers?

The result was the AvantGrand N3, a gorgeous baby grand hybrid piano that you can buy today for about $15,000. (Yamaha won’t reveal its pianos’ street prices, only ludicrously high suggested retail prices. The prices printed here come from Chicago’s Grand Piano Haus, but the three other dealers I called across the country were in the same ballpark.)

The feel of the N3’s wooden keys and hammers is identical to those on Yamaha’s real pianos; you even feel the keys subtly vibrate when you strike them hard, exactly as on a real piano. The samples and speakers are so good, most players would not even realize it’s not a real grand piano.>

So technology has made it so that no one HAS to buy a grand piano anymore?

In theory, though CobraBoy cornered the market on Amiga's which became popular as *UNIQIUE* sound mixing processors.

I'd like to see Yamaha try that with violins...

Oh cool. Great video! I do wonder why synthesizers aren't more popular.