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Perhaps put yourself in the manufacturer's shoes. It's likely that whatever innovations/ features/ improvements that people are clamoring for right now are already developed and ready to be deployed. But why are they not in the latest offerings? Because they have to think of DP as long term, lifestyle habit that needs to be cultivated in the consumers. They have to trickle out the new improvements enough so people can justify an upgrade now, but not so much that they put off purchasing a new one for more than 3 years. It's the consumer's buying habit that drives R&D and sustains the whole DP enterprise. You make progress possible.

Note Gamma1734 has a silent piano, not a hybrid. It is a confusing term. Hybrids may not suffer from this problem. And we don't know how general it is for silent pianos.

@gamma talks about the axis of the key which I assume is the balance rail.

@pianogabe talks about the shank hitting the silencing rail

I think those are different things.

@ambrozy mentions that strings don’t absorb much energy drawing into question the statements from the tech working @gammas piano

@ambrozy has a silent piano often called hybrid but not to be confused with hybrids that are purely digital which have no strings.

That doesn't make sense either, to me, I never heard of the balance rail wearing out and having to be replaced. New felts maybe. I think he means the hammer shank by axis but am not sure.

You should put yourself into the shoes of a DP salesman. Then you'd recognize that most consumers have no clue. They want it cheap, small and fit nicely in their living room. Or get a bad starter instrument for their kids. They don't care that contact rubber isn't the most reliable dynamics measurement method, which is why optical DPs are still so expensive, why most DPs are small, cheap, and usually thrown away after a few years after warranty runs out, nor have they ever heard the term "pivot". You are mostly out of luck if you look at it from a serious player perspective. DP builders primarily don't care about people lurking in forums like these. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Can you link that video if possible?

Apart from that, I agree. Even formally they don't even try to imitate the real good stuff like the concert grands (probably because full mechanics on display attract more customers than an action that actually resembles the playability of one of the finest instruments...). Old topic: pivot lengths. The AvantGrand series does not really shine in that respect. The LX-706 seems to make some progress and for only 3k€ it matches the Novus pivots. However, I wouldn't want to repair that thing because like most keyboards they made the contact rubbers as inaccessible as possible - despite the fact that they put that action into a huge upright form factor......... wtf. Just think about it: disassemble the entire keyboard and half of the piano, then reassemble it, just to discover that it's still not working properly.... rinse, repeat. Holy cow, what a design flaw. And they are ALL doing it (to some extent). That tells you what type of consumer they address: just throw it away when your guarantee runs out.

Another point: have you ever seen a guaranteed tolerance for key response precision? By any manufacturer? At all? ie. how uniform must the velocity response (MIDI data) be in order to be considered "functional"? Noone cares. Noone measures it. Poeple just complain if it becomes too obvious. Now think about people starting to learn the piano on a badly regulated instrument and mistrain their ears playstyle... the more I get into these things, the more I despise the whole DP industry. I'm currently thinking about using a simple non-hammer MIDI controller for playing, cost me 339€. Simply because I'm refusing to "upgrade" to something of which I can't even be sure that it's actually better and easily repairable.

I think you'd be right if we were talking about entry level DPs, but once you're talking about DPs which are 1500 to 3000 dollars, reputations depend on finer issues than does it fit into my son's bedroom.

Is that a fact or do you just make an assumption? I don't see any benefit of the N3X besides fitting nicely into a living room for decorative purposes. At least not any benefit that would fit the additional price tag of 10k€ over the N1X. Also, the above video confirms my position: she finds out about the (minor) downsides after a year, not before. heck, she even complains about the light touch..... one should think before buying a 17k€ instrument, she'd at least be aware of how the keys feel. But no.

My original point was that Yamaha had the opportunity to build the ideal practice (and creative?) hybrid piano for professional classical pianists, and seems to have fallen slightly short, mainly due to the action being too light.