Anyone else get sense the desperation in this?<p>Once upon a time every middle-class home had to have a piano. Now they are relics. Sales of home pianos have tanked. Steinway sells to the pros, a small market, and the very rich. But those very rich who were raised with pianos in every home are getting older. Their kids don't want to spend $$$,$$$ on a great piano and the maintenance it requires. So Steinway is injecting technology in hopes of keeping the rich onside.<p>Pianos, the good ones, last for decades. But what will this ipod-dependant thing look like in 2030 or 2060? Will they join their brethren in concert halls, or lie forgotten in grandma's storage locker? An old Steinway is a useful device capable of doing the same job today as it did when built. An network-enabled ipad accessory will not age so well.
Not to be that guy, but. You can't play a concerto by yourself because a concerto is when you play as a soloist with an orchestra. And you can't really say "a perfect concerto" like "a perfect arpeggio". Would make more sense to say "Can play a sonata by itself perfectly."
This is not new. Steinway has these systems for years; only news is the piano can talk to an ipad now ...<p>The first systems that could reproduce dynamics are from 1904:
<a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.weltemignon.ch%2Fweltemignon.ch%2Fweltemignon%2Fwelte_info.htm&sandbox=1" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=h...</a><p>There are actually lots of old piano roll recordings from great artists like Rachmaninoff, Gershwin any many others around. Some people actually scanned them and converted them to MIDI:
<a href="http://www.pianola.co.nz/public/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pianola.co.nz/public/</a><p>These files can now be played on a Yamaha Disklavier, or the Steinway CEUS or now this new one.<p>Or they can be played with software-modeled pianos like PianoTeq or sampled-based software pianos. Really nice.