Yamaha N3X

When it comes to judging piano tone, much depends on personal taste. To help you achieve the tonal palette you desire, Yamaha offers the choice of two world-class grand pianos in one—each with its own unique character to convey the emotion you want to express through a piece of music. At the touch of a button on the new AvantGrand N3X, you can opt for authentic sounds sampled either from a Yamaha CFX concert grand or from a Bösendorfer Imperial. As Yamaha’s flagship grand piano, the majestic CFX boasts a wide palette of tonal colors, from sparkling high notes to powerful bass tones. The legendary Bösendorfer, meanwhile, is renowned for its sonorous and rich Viennese sound. Either way, the lifelike sounds of the AvantGrand N3X allow you to explore the outer reaches of your expressive imagination.

The AvantGrand series takes a unique approach to reproducing the sound of an acoustic grand piano. When capturing the original source sounds from a specially selected full concert grand, Yamaha technicians took samples from four different positions across the soundboard: left, right, center, and rear. Compared to conventional left-and-right channel (stereo) recording, this yielded wonderfully rich and authentic results. To make the most of this four-channel source sound, AvantGrand pianos employ Yamaha’s Spatial Acoustic Speaker System—a four-point speaker configuration that allows AvantGrand pianos to deliver faithful three-dimensional recreations of the original instruments. For the N3X, speaker placement mirrors the four recording positions on the source piano.

In addition to the four-channel Spatial Acoustic Speaker System, the AvantGrand features a flat-panel Soundboard Resonator located beneath the music rest and spanning the width of the instrument. This component allows for a more subtle reproduction of the buildup of sound that you feel when playing an acoustic grand piano. It works by using an oscillating transducer to transmit vibrations to the flat-panel soundboard, giving a realistic sound response that is especially evident in the upper key range.

In a grand piano, strings and sounds resonate throughout the entire body of the instrument producing a rich reverberation that envelops the listener in sound. Not only are the strings you are playing vibrating, but other strings ring as a reaction to ones you play. This is one reason the piano sound is so complex and rich.

This phenomena is reproduced perfectly in the AvantGrand N3X through Virtual Resonance Modeling (VRM) which calculates the various states of the strings for each of the 88 notes on the keyboard from one instant to the next. As a result, the N3X reflects the limitless number of factors inherent in playing an acoustic piano such as which keys are pressed, the strength with which the keys are played and pedal timing.